Author: philg

Wouldn’t sending migrants to sanctuary cities enrich them?

by philg

“Trump claimed Oakland’s mayor doesn’t want released immigrants. Her response: We welcome all.” (Washington Post):

President Trump threw more fuel on the flames of the immigration debate Saturday night in a series of tweets that singled out Democrats and news outlets that had reported on his administration’s plan to relocate migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.”

Trump specifically singled out the mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf (D), who had criticized a proposed policy to relocate detained immigrants to sanctuary cities as an “abuse of power and public resources.”

Then the president claimed that the mayor does not actually want the detained immigrants to be released into her city. In fact, Schaaf’s administration strengthened Oakland’s sanctuary policy in 2018 and had warned residents last year of an upcoming raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

On Saturday night, she responded to Trump’s attack with a clear message: “Oakland welcomes all.”

In a federally funded welfare state such as the U.S., aren’t poor people an asset for a lot of the politically influential folks within a city? Migrants should be entitled to Medicaid, right? That helps the local health care industry. Migrants should be entitled to food stamps. That is a boost to local supermarket owners. Migrants should be entitled to housing subsidies and/or will have to do some work to pay rent. That’s a boon to anyone who owns an apartment building.

California funds schools centrally. Every migrant child who shows up for a day in an Oakland school, for example, will result in a transfer of funds from Sacramento to Oakland. There should also be federal funds for every new student from a low-income or no-income family.

Might it be an economically rational strategy for political and economic elites in Oakland to pursue a leadership position in the hosting of migrants?

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Rejected white male

by philg

A friend is an MIT graduate. His son scored 750 math/730 verbal on the SATs, has a perfect high school record, and is a super-nice kid who is passionate about building software. When filling out the application forms, he checked “white male”.

MIT rejected him.

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Separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites at Columbia University

by philg

Back in 2014, I wrote about Oberlin College setting up special dorms for students with darker skin and/or less family money.

Much funnier is this recent video (not de-platformed by YouTube/Google yet!) of white Columbia students singing the praises of separate but equal.

[Video source: a deeply closeted Harvard professor (thus far he has managed to conceal his sinful thoughts from colleagues and administrators).]

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If the IRS did run its own online service for tax filing, would it need to use hardcopy and snail mail?

by philg

“Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.” (ProPublica) is about a bipartisan effort to prevent the IRS from making it easy to file taxes. The IRS is in a unique position because it alone has records on what Americans have earned via W-2, 1099, and K-1. Even if TurboTax has better software, for example, it can never start with the authoritative data. (Consider the taxpayer who runs a small Schedule C business and simply loses a 1099 form or the taxpayer who is involved in a bunch of partnerships and loses a K-1; even if these folks are diligent and accurate about rekeying the information from pieces of paper they receive in the mail, they will get flagged for a correction or an audit.)

Given the mournful history of computer (in)security, though, and the lack of Estonian-style electronic authentication for citizens and other residents, I wonder if the hypothetical IRS systems that people are conceiving would ever be practical. What would stop a clever hacker from getting in and downloading information on what every American has earned for the preceding year?

Would the IRS in fact have to rely on mailing printouts to taxpayers’ previously filed addresses? Maybe the hardcopy would contain a generated random key for logging into a web site to enter corrections and tweaks. But what other secure way does the U.S. Government have of reaching residents?

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Black hole photo: Back to the lone genius in science?

by philg

From one of our most intelligent citizens, a salute to the scientific genius working alone:

Brian Keating’s Losing the Nobel Prize, published just last year, said that the age of a Katherine Clerk Maxwell discovering Maxwell’s Equations mostly on her own was over. The book describes a paper regarding Higgs boson discovery with 6,225 co-authors.

Readers: What is the significance of this “photo” (it is all false or pseudo color since the emissions were not in the visible portion of the E-M spectrum)? What is the actual “advancement of science”? (Rare break from Trump hatred from the NY Times: article on how the experiment worked. The core article on the announcement doesn’t suggest that any in-question hypotheses were confirmed or rejected. I asked a physicist friend: “it’s not exactly the event horizon. It’s the photosphere seen on edge. With limb darkening, it appears as a torus. … eventually you might use images like this to see how general relativity plays out over time. In other words, make a movie called Event Horizon (after they see the actual horizon that is). … It confirmed part of a theoretical prediction. One that was made by a scientist other than Einstein.”)

(Separately, my Facebook friends who were energized by this example of female nerddom (a postdoc identifying as a “woman” writing software! And earning 1/8th the income of a same-age dermatologist (postdoc salary provides less after-tax spending power than obtainable by having sex with a primary care doctor in Massachusetts)) decided that they needed to add a photo of another successful female-identifying programmer. They had to reach back only half a century to find one:

In 1969 Margaret Hamilton wrote the onboard software code for Apollo 11 and coined the term “software engineering.” Now 50 years later, Dr. Katie Bouman’s algorithm enabled the connecting of telescopes around the world to take the first photo ever of a black hole. Here is a photo of Margaret Hamilton with the reams of code, and one of Dr. Bouman with the hard drives containing the 5 petabytes of data generated. Cheers to #WomeninSTEM – now imagine what we could do if they let women run the world! (Photo credit @floragraham). #blackhole #bigdata #IoT

The folks who were excited to see someone identify as female sitting at a desk typing code took their last science class in high school, would consider attending a computer science course to be a physical assault, and would flee if offered the opportunity to spend 45 minutes learning about how their smartphones work.

(There seems to be some question regarding whether Margaret Hamilton was the sole author of the big stack of assembly language code next to which she stands. In 2014, for example, the Boston Globe ran an obituary on Richard H. Battin:

Dr. Battin, who developed and led the design of the guidance, navigation, and control systems for the Apollo flights … As astronauts Neil Armstrong and Aldrin were approaching the Sea of Tranquility on that historic July 20, 1969, flight, Dr. Battin was at Mission Control in Houston with MIT Instrumentation Lab founder Charles Stark “Doc” Draper.

See also a 2016 discussion on Hacker News on the question of whether this Battin guy contributed anything significant.))

Is it safe to say that the 19th century lone genius of science is back?

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Zero progress in American politics since 1776

by philg

I’ve been listening to America’s Founding Fathers, a lecture series by Allen Guelzo, a professor at Gettysburg College.

It turns out that all of the things that Americans fight and fret about today were issues around the time of the country’s creation (i.e., the traitorous and illegal secession from Great Britain).

People questioned whether a republican form of government made sense. From the notes:

… there had been only a few examples of successful republics in human history—particularly, Rome and Athens—and they offered only a handful of useful rules for guidance:

First, a republic must be harmonious. It cannot be divided in purpose; it must be guided by a common vision of the public good.

Second, it must be homogeneous—composed of citizens who are ethnically, economically, and socially more or less equal in wealth and status.

Third, a republic must be small, if only because harmony and homogeneity break down whenever the boundaries of a republic are drawn to include too many different kinds of people or so much territory that people cannot keep vigil over their fellow citizens.

Fourth, every citizen of a republic must be independent and self-sufficient enough to be able to occupy a public office.

Our Founding Fathers, including George Washington, questioned whether Americans were sufficiently virtuous to govern themselves. With the average person being primarily concerned with making money and quite a few folks “corrupt, selfish, and indolent,” how could the resulting conglomeration of these folks ever be sustainable? Washington, 1783:

the want of energy in the Federal government, the pulling of one state and party of states against another and the commotion amongst the Eastern people have sunk our national character much below par [and] brought our politics and credit to the brink of a precipice.

(i.e., we’ve been on the brink of a precipice for more than 230 years!)

During the Confederation period, Americans attacked political opponents, e.g., Robert Morris, the rebellious colonies’ first “superintendent of finance,” by alleging that people with high-level executive jobs were enriching themselves via corruption.

Politicians were not necessarily examples of traditional virtue in private matters:

[President of Congress Thomas] Mifflin retired from his congressional presidency and spent most of the remaining 16 years of his life in Pennsylvania politics and in what one critic described as “a state of adultery with many women.” Several towns and structures were named for him, but he also burned through most of his family’s fortune and ended up hiding from bill collectors.

The course is replete with examples of “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (Samuel Johnson). Patrick Henry:

In 1774, when he called on the House to begin arming Virginians for resistance to the Crown, Henry spoke his most famous words: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me … give me liberty, or give me death!”

Paying 1-2 percent of income in total tax (see this article Foreign Policy on what American colonists paid) was an intolerable state of “slavery” and equivalent to being in “chains,” for Henry, “a slaveholder throughout his adult life” (Wikipedia).

Early Americans complained about concentrations of wealth and considered themselves fortunate that the disparities were not as large as in Europe.

States maintained a degree of independence and sovereignty to a degree that would be unimaginable today. They would use this to issue their own paper currency, help their citizens escape paying debts to Britons or citizens of other states, and weasel out of their own financial commitments to the Continental Congress.

The bad news is that we’re not making any progress, but maybe the good news is that the disputes that described as “crises” every day in the New York Times were with us in the 1780s.

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New tax rates applied in New York State

by philg

“Surprise: Most NYers did well by Trump’s tax cuts but very rich at risk” (NY Post) says that, despite New York having the nation’s highest state and local tax burden and the limit on deductions for these taxes, the typical New Yorker actually paid less in 2018.

(Exception: “the big losers from the SALT cap are concentrated among the Empire State’s highest-earning residents, the 1-percenters who generate more than 40 percent of the state’s personal-income tax as well as an outsized share of New York City taxes.”)

This is counterintuitive. We should expect the new tax system to cut back on people in low-tax states subsidizing those in high-tax states (e.g., taxpayers in Nevada, New Hampshire, and Florida would no longer have to pay part of the cost of services provided in Manhattan). Maybe the answer is that almost everyone nationwide is getting a tax cut and folks who live in the highest tax states are getting a smaller one? Or New York is a special case because its taxes fall so heavily on a small percentage of its population?

I hope everyone is enjoying finalizing their tax returns. Should we have a contest in the comments to see who is grappling with the largest number of pages of forms? (Include forms for any LLCs or S Corps if you’re responsible for reviewing them, also for children if you need to file for them, and include 1099 and W-2 forms that you receive and review.) I think that I should clock in at roughly 500 pages this year.

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If fentanyl has been legal in China, why so few addicts?

by philg

“China Bans All Types of Fentanyl, Cutting Supply of Deadly Drug to U.S. and Fulfilling Pledge to Trump” (nytimes):

China announced on Monday that it would ban all variants of the powerful opioid fentanyl, a move that could slow the supply of a drug that in recent years has caused tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States.

China already treats more than two dozen variants of fentanyl and its precursors as controlled substances, thus strictly regulating their production and distribution, but it has banned those variants only after reviewing them case by case, a process that can be lengthy. And because so many more variants exist, and new ones are constantly being created, banning them as a broadly defined class could be far more effective.

“We believe that the United States is the main cause of the problem of the abuse of fentanyl in the United States,” [Liu Yuejin, vice commissioner of the National Narcotics Control Commission] said, citing weak enforcement and a culture of addiction. He noted that the United States consumed 80 percent of the world’s opioids while making up only 5 percent of the world’s population.

In other words, until now fentanyl has been de facto legal in China. Why does a Google search for “China fentanyl addicts” turn up essentially nothing about Chinese people in China being addicted?

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New York Times tells Muslims how to be Muslim

by philg

“Brunei’s Royal Barbarity and Hypocrisy” is from the New York Times Editorial Board:

The oil-rich sultanate imposes harsh Shariah law on its subjects, while members of the royal family enjoy lives of conspicuous luxury.

Brunei’s cruel, inhuman and degrading penalties are not a relic of history, like the sodomy laws that stayed on the books of American states well into the 20th century, but the whim of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, 72, who has ruled the Lilliputian nation since 1967 and ranks among the most ludicrously wealthy people on earth. He has long pushed his predominantly Muslim nation toward a conservative and restrictive form of Islam, and he first announced the new penalties — which, in addition to death by stoning for gay male sex, include amputation for theft and 40 lashes for lesbian sex — six years ago.

Besides the barbarity of the penalties, there is the danger that the law could nudge neighboring Islamic giants Malaysia and Indonesia toward tightening their own national or regional versions of Shariah laws targeting homosexuals.

The biographies of the authors do not suggest any expert knowledge of Islam or Shariah law. What qualifies these folks to tell Muslims in Brunei how to organize their lives in accordance with Islam? Is this “Amerisplaining”?

Also interesting… “The U.S. Immigration System May Have Reached a Breaking Point” (nytimes), from the same newspaper that said, three months ago, Donald Trump had manufactured a crisis. Now it seems that the “crisis” started five years ago:

The very nature of immigration to America changed after 2014, when families first began showing up in large numbers. The resulting crisis has overwhelmed a system unable to detain, care for and quickly decide the fate of tens of thousands of people who claim to be fleeing for their lives. … The country is now unable to provide either the necessary humanitarian relief for desperate migrants or even basic controls on the number and nature of who is entering the United States.

Trump is on the wrong track, as usual:

Mr. Trump has insisted on simply trying to stop people from getting into the country in the first place — a policy of deterrence that not only has failed but has made the problem worse.

Only a rookie would try to stop people from crossing the border into the U.S. by trying to stop them from crossing the border!

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What happens to Julian Assange now?

by philg

The UK is not so busy with its non-Brexit Brexit that it couldn’t arrest and plan to extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. Back in 2017, Newsweek ran an article explaining why the First Amendment would be unlikely to protect Mr. Assange from a charge of espionage. The NYT says that these freedom of speech issues may not be relevant:

The single charge, conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, stems from what prosecutors said was his agreement to break a password to a classified United States government computer. It is not an espionage charge, a significant detail that will come as a relief to press freedom advocates.

Is there any chance he can beat the rap at this point?

(Also, what has been the ultimate impact of WikiLeaks? They generated some headlines that helped the media sell ads, plainly, but did governments learn anything new from WikiLeaks? Did any policies change?)

Related:

  • WIRED article explaining that the charge is an attempt to go from hashed to cleartext on a password. There is a potential issue with statute of limitations: Ekeland also points out that to expand the statute of limitations for the CFAA from the normal five years to the necessary eight in this case, given the indictment’s date of March 2018, the Justice Department is charging Assange under a statute that labels his alleged hacking an “act of terrorism.” He sees that as another suspect element of the case, if not one that would necessarily hinder prosecution. “To get the benefit of the eight years, they’re trying to call this a terrorist act,” Ekeland says. “That seems a little weird.”
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