Month: November 2016

In an earlier post I mentioned that the school superintendent here in a rich suburb of Boston had emailed about a meeting with a child psychologist regarding “How to talk with your children about the election and its aftermath”.

I went to the meeting!

First, what had kids actually learned at school?

• a first-grader heard that Trump would be rounding up women and then shooting them
• a second-grader thought that four of her classmates (children of legal immigrants, I believe, and one of them Muslim) would be deported by Trump
• a father overhead third-grade girls say “My mom said the President is a racist.” (children in Happy Valley cannot be dumped off at the curb; parents who are serious about parenting walk them into school and assist them with locker operations)
• a fifth-grade boy saw a plane overhead (probably a Gulfstream off KBED heading 250 bound for Teterboro with one rich bastard in the back) after school and wanted to go straight home out of fear that the plane would be dropping bombs

There was a broad spectrum of political opinion represented at the meeting: Trump’s victory ranged from being characterized as a “crisis” to a “catastrophe”. The therapist herself admitted to going on a long angry rant (to a friend) about Trump in front of her 7-year-old: “We’re scared and they know it.”

One challenge at the meeting was keeping the focus on children. Adults kept wanting to talk about their own grief and how could they be healed. When the discussion would circle back to the kids, the therapist recommended telling children “I’m really upset” or “I’m worried about this because it is not the way I want the country to go.” A father who is a member of the town School Committee said “My mood is down, but I don’t hide it from the kids [11 and 13]. I don’t believe in putting on a false face.” He then compared us to Germany in the 1930s (but without the high quality carpentry?).

A woman who had sued her husband talked about the challenge presented by the middle school boy learning (during occasional visits with the father) that the defendant had supported Trump. She presented her passionate support for Hillary and his vote for Trump as a vast moral gulf that the child was having trouble navigating. This prompted the therapist to remind the group that not all Trump voters were racists and sexists. Some people voted for Trump for “reasons that came out of their own pain” (i.e., the difference in voting behavior could not be explained by the fact that the person who is not subject to income tax (child support is tax-free) voted for a Democrat while the person who pays taxes voted for a Republican in hopes of facing lower tax rates).

I dumbfounded the group by asking “Would it make sense to try to point out some things that might be better for them under a Trump Administration compared to what they experienced in the last few years?” Jaws literally dropped.

The most practical-sounding advice from the therapist was to throw questions back at children. If a child says “X told me that Trump is a racist” then ask “What do you understand a racist to be?” This way the adult response is calibrated to what the child actually cares about.

The therapist noted that, although the walls of every school may be plastered with posters about tolerance, love, acceptance, etc., there remains aggression, a lot of which was let loose during the campaign. It is this aggression that is upsetting to children. She recommended reminding them repeatedly that they are safe (but see above for how she doesn’t truly believe it), kind of like the message to MIT undergraduates. “Model calm and confidence. Show them where is the strong place, the safe place.”

Bonus image of a non-deplorable’s car (taken the weekend following the election):

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After two years of working well, my Verizon FiOS 75/75 service flaked out on a Sunday afternoon. Packets were dropped, even before it was possible to resolve host names via DNS. I managed to do an Ookla Speedtest from my phone and got 25/0.05 as the result.

Thus began a two-hour phone odyssey with Verizon tech support that began with a heavily accented person seemingly in a distant foreign land who was plainly reading from a script. He had ideas that were absurd if you thought about it for a few minutes, e.g., rebooting the wired desktop PC after a report that all devices connected either wirelessly or wired were unable to get Internet access. He ideas that were absurd if you thought it for 5 seconds, e.g., unplugging and checking the coax cable (untouched for two years since the install) going into the ActionTec router to see if it was “in good condition” (how would a consumer know?). He was preparing to send a service technician to the house later in the week, warning that if the problem turned out to be my PC rather than Verizon’s gear, we would be charged (amount unspecified). I asked “Do you have anyone there who is familiar with computer networking?”

The networking person (who asked me to tell him what was shown by a tracert) concluded that it was likely a problem with Verizon’s network and filed a trouble ticket. He also shipped out a new router in case the problem did turn out to be the router. By the next morning whoever had looked at the trouble ticket got everything working again.

As we talk about artificial intelligence and the glorious future of self-driving cars where we will be entrusting our lives to software, I wonder why it is a human job to look at network quality. Verizon actually supplied me with the ActionTec router. The router runs, I think, a full Unix operating system. Why doesn’t the router periodically measure network quality and, if there is a problem, use its last few packets of connectivity to alert Verizon tech support automatically? (Or maybe use the landline channel, which continued to work throughout this debacle.)

One of the great things about paying taxes to support the Great Father in Washington’s antitrust bureaucracy is that we get to choose from either 1 or 2 broadband Internet vendors in any given U.S. location. We also get to choose from device operating systems made by one of three companies: Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Why is it my job to sit at a Windows 10 browser and notice that web pages can’t be viewed? Why isn’t it Windows 10’s job to be able to detect a near-total network failure and send out UDP packets to the relevant monopoly broadband supplier? It is a pretty short list of vendors with whom Microsoft would need to agree on a protocol.

[And, separately, as long as we’re talking about AI, why can’t Microsoft Word notice that there is a bunch of non-bold small text interspersed with bold larger text and conclude from this that the large bold items are headings and should be “kept with next” automatically? Or at least prompt the author “Do you want to keep this with the next paragraph?”]

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A few days ago I posted a three-second video on Facebook (equivalent YouTube version) with the following caption: We met this dolphin in Sarasota. He said that he voted for Trump because he is enthusiastic about global warming and sea level rise. Why, we asked? “I want to move into a third floor condo in Miami,” he replied.

My Facebook friends, nearly all of whom supported Hillary Clinton, did not think this was funny! Is that because (a) it is in fact not funny, (b) they have a poor sense of humor, or (c) they’re still using up all of their emotions mourning the loss of President Hillary?

[Note that, as an engineer, I think that any solution to problems caused by atmospheric CO2 will be engineering and infrastructure solutions. The U.S. is a shrinking percentage of global CO2 output. We tend to be led by politicians with no technical or scientific background (see Why would anyone expect the U.S. to be a leader in dealing with CO2 emissions, climate change, etc.?). We are no longer great at engineering and we’re terrible at building infrastructure (see U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results and High-speed Rail in California versus China). If the Earth does need to be saved from humans, I think that it will be Chinese and Germans who do the saving and therefore the American public’s choice of a president is not relevant.]

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U.S. population keeps growing (going forward, 88 percent due to immigration). Real estate in desirable locations keeps getting more expensive. It seems that the inevitable result will be an ever-higher percentage of Americans living in apartments where there are more unrelated adults than bedrooms, kind of like migrant workers already do in Chinese cities and young Americans already do in New York City (and San Francisco/Silicon Valley?). Could this bed tent be the wave of the future? What if it were upgraded with much thicker and multi-layer material for soundproofing?

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Some choices are even tougher than Hillary Clinton v. Donald Trump…

We’re using a conventional wood-frame house as a combination of office and home. It was built in the late 1960s with perhaps 10 inches of fiberglass between the rafters. There are cathedral ceilings everywhere, hence no possibility of insulating an attic (no attic! Also no basement; architects back then were smart enough to foresee that America would become less cluttered and there would be no need to store anything). The basic shape of the house is the same as a double-wide trailer home. (But of course Zillow estimates the value at about $1 million due to the proximity to Boston and the general impracticality of building anything new in Massachusetts.)

A local architect suggested putting nail-base foam panels on top of the existing roof deck. This gives 3.5 inches of foam and and then another 0.5″ of OSB to which shingles can be nailed. Apparently this is a fairly common retrofit insulation technique for old-yet-modern-style houses like this one. There would be some foam injected into any gaps between the panels.

We then have a choice of whether to do ice-and-water shield over the entire roof or just the lower 6′. The advantage of not doing the whole thing is that maybe water vapor would have a better chance to escape?

On top of the ice-and-water shield we then have to pick shingles. This is where I am hoping to get answers from readers! Consumer Reports tested shingles in 2009 and found that high-end Owens Corning Berkshire Collection and CertainTeed Grand Manor were the best (strongest). Owens Corning Oakridge and CertainTeed Landmark were pretty good at about one third the price. The roof is only about 3750 square feet including budgeted waste, so I don’t think that the shingle price difference will be that large in the overall context of the project.

What do folks who’ve been through this recently have to say? How did you choose a shingle and what did you choose?

One more idea: Should we try to hold out for another year and get the Tesla solar energy tiles? It looks like a good product, but I wonder if it will be shipped within my lifetime. Also you probably wouldn’t want to do the north side of your house with these, right? So then you are supposed to find matching non-solar shingles for the north side?

[Note that this continues the theme of why you want to rent rather than buy; the brain of the homeowner is entirely filled up with boring stuff.]

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Bill Burr tells Americans to chill out regarding the election result:”If you liked Obama did he call you at all in the last eight years? Did he ever put a sandwich on your table?”

Separately, our local school superintendant sent out an announcement of a talk titled “How to talk with your children about the election and its aftermath”:

From the campaign, through the election week and now to the next phase, people have repeatedly asked the question, “How do I talk to my kids about this?” Please join us for a discussion around these issues. The conversation will be facilitated by Hedley Q. Shrinker, PhD, a licensed psychologist (and Happy Valley parent) who has worked with parents and families in ordinary times as well as in extraordinary times (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Boxing Day Tsunami).

Some closeted non-Hillary-supporters drafted questions for the good doctor:

• How do we explain to Devon and Courtney that they’re going to inherit twice as much money if Trump is able to persuade Congress to eliminate the estate tax?
• How do we explain to Kate that she won’t need to create offshore intellectual property vehicles the way that Apple has because Trump is going to lower the corporate income tax rate?
• How do we tell Marina that she won’t need to stock up on guns and ammo because Trump will preserve her Second Amendment rights?

One friend noted that “I talked to my kids about Trump. They are not white so they are supposed to be scared. I woke them up and said ‘Guess what? Trump won.’ [The 7-year-old girl] said ‘Well, Hillary does lie a lot.'”

Related:

• Bill Burr on average people criticizing the accomplished (about halfway through)
• Bill Burr on Steve Jobs
• Bill Burr on old people and racism

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Shiva Ayyadurai sued Gawker/Gizmodo because the site “cast doubt on his claims to have invented email in 1978” (Huffington Post). Gawker went bankrupt (Gizmodo) and had to wind up its litigation. Hulk Hogan got $31 million based on a jury award of $140 million (i.e., the jury decided that Hogan was more injured by publication of a sex video than if he had been killed; presumably his future earning capacity was less than $140 million). The inventor of email got $750,000 for a case that he probably would have lost, but the lawyers trying to clean up Gawker’s affairs for the Chapter 11 proceeding couldn’t wait that long.

[How do I know that Gawker was right in saying that Shiva Ayyadurai did not invent email in 1978? It was in 1976 that I got my present email address: philg@mit.edu, morphed slightly from “philg@mit-mc” after development of DNS (see RFC 733 for how email addresses looked back in 1977). Based on my personal knowledge, therefore, Shiva Ayyadurai invented email no later than 1976.]

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My Facebook feed is lit up with hatred for a person I had not previously heard of: Steve Bannon.

The “Government Official” “U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren” Facebook page contains a denunciation from Ms. Warren:

Donald Trump just made one of his first big decisions as President-Elect: appointing Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor. … He told his ex-wife that he didn’t want their daughters going to school with Jewish children … Bannon’s appointment shows that so far President-Elect Trump is embracing the same kind of ugliness and divisiveness as he did throughout his campaign.

Warren, an attorney by training, states as fact that Bannon said this to his plaintiff. Yet the only evidence of this purported anti-Jewish statement seems to be an affidavit filed by the plaintiff herself back in 2007 when seeking custody and associated child support profits (i.e., potentially tens of millions of dollars at stake in California). See New York Daily News story, which also seems to assume as true whatever the cash-seeking plaintiff had to say. Given that there is no practical possibility of a perjury conviction based on a statement in an American family court, the fact that a typical high-$$ child support plaintiff alleges a lot worse (see the Domestic Violence Parallel Track chapter), and that this was apparently never corroborated by anyone else at the time or more recently when reporters sought to interview the plaintiff, this doesn’t seem like credible evidence of Jew-hatred.

[Elizabeth Warren was herself a divorce, custody, and child support plaintiff, having sued Jim Warren, the father of her two children (source), so she has at least some experience with family court.]

A professor friend writes

An avowed white supremacist and antisemite–Stephen Bannon–is now essentially second-in-command. Do what you can to #stopbannon … Call Jared Kushner’s NYC office and you can talk with a real live human being about his father-in-law’s appointment of an anti-semite white supremacist to a White House staff position! It’s fun! 212-527-7000! I think I will call several times!

But where did Mr. Bannon take these vows? The professor didn’t cite any statements by the guy. Her friends commented approvingly and/or with additional ideas for action. They all seemed to accept as true that Mr. Bannon has taken these vows. Certainly nobody asked “How do you know he hates Jews and non-whites?” In a comment on How do MIT students cope with the Trumpenfuhrer? one of our readers here found a couple of Breitbart articles (out of thousands? or tens of thousands?) with sensational headlines, but neither was written by Bannon and one of the Jew-hatred examples was authored by someone who says “I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered — Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas — have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews.”

Readers: Please help me understand what is wrong with Steve Bannon and whether his hiring signals that it is time for American Jews to escape to Israel (maybe Donald Trump’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law will give us a ride on the family B757?).

[Note that Israel’s corporate tax rate was just reduced to 25 percent. Capital gains tax rates are lower than here in the U.S. due to inflation-adjustment, the lack of a state tax, and the lack of the Obamacare supplemental tax. Thus an entrepreneur might be better off financially following forced expatriation by Steve Bannon.]

Related:

• Elizabeth Warren helps another politician raise money on a “get money out of politics” platform (unfortunately it seems as though the junior politician has lost her bid for Congress)
• a 2014 interview with Bannon (he does not take any vows of Jew-hatred or white supremacy, but does say that voters will rebel against D.C.-based crony capitalism)

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Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith says that 100 percent of the people whom Eisenhower appointed to his first-term Cabinet were without any previous experience in government (they had been business managers). The country seems to have survived. So don’t lost sleep over whom Trump appoints to Cabinet Secretary positions.

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Lawrence in Arabia quotes a letter from Aaron Aaronsohn (“Not to be confused with Aaron A. Aaronson, a fictional character in the Simpsons episode Sideshow Bob Roberts.”) to his brother, regarding an upcoming meeting with some fellow Zionists:

I told him that I was not going to London to quarrel, only to tell them their mistakes and to show them the way to do things properly.

I think this summarizes the politically-oriented posts that show up in my Facebook feed!

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