Author: philg

Four different readers asked me for comments on “Hedge Funder Offered $75,000 to His Girlfriend for Abortion” (Yahoo! Style) or an underlying NY Post article: “My hedge-fund boyfriend tried to bribe me to get an abortion: suit”.

My response: Given that New York family law provides for a fixed 17 percent of her defendant’s pre-tax income in child support revenue, mostly this is just some added color for Elmira Naymark’s lawsuit. If her 29-year-old defendant earns more than $360,000/year, the profitability of the child beyond $61,200/year (tax-free; $1.285 million over 21 years) will depend to some extent on judicial discretion, so highlighting the failed abortion transaction may yet have some practical significance.

Why did this transaction fail? When we interviewed lawyers for Real World Divorce we found that abortion negotiations are commonly handled by attorneys, not by a “friend” and and the mom as in this case. As with taking pills to ensure pregnancy following a one-night encounter, abortion sales tend to occur in states where collecting child support is potentially more lucrative than going to college and working at the median college graduate wage. The friend’s purported offer of “50k-75,000+” is not consistent with attorney-handled transactions, which more typically are completed at roughly 50 percent of the net present value of the child support cashflow (21 years in New York), plus the potential plaintiff’s legal fees.

[Note that the net present value of obtaining custody of the 29-year-old defendant’s biological child would be totally different in various jurisdictions around the U.S. and the world. The plaintiff would receive a maximum of about $5,000 per year in Germany, $8,000 per year in Denmark, $13,000 per year for 18 years in Nevada, and just over $20,000 per year for 18 years in Minnesota or Texas. The child’s schedule would be completely different among these jurisdictions as well, ranging from about 17 percent of the time with the loser parent in New York to a statutory 50/50 schedule in Nevada or Arizona.]

Related:

• “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”
• “Abortion Is Found to Have Little Effect on Women’s Mental Health” (nytimes)

Full post, including comments

One hazardous mental attitude in aviation is over-commitment to a course of action and a failure to keep all alternatives in mind. You plan to depart in the morning and stick to that plan even when the terminal forecast shows that much better weather is expected for the afternoon.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East gives us some history about one of the worst examples of this, the British Gallipoli Campaign:

But when it came to committing folly, British war planners were just warming up. The principal landing zones for Med-Ex, it had been decided, would be on the Gallipoli peninsula, that thin ribbon of rugged mountains that forms the Dardanelles’ western shore. Rarely more than six or seven miles across, the peninsula runs northward for some fifty miles before finally broadening out onto the European mainland. In selecting where to go ashore, the British could have chosen any number of spots along Gallipoli’s length where a ground force, once gaining the ridgeline and climbing down to the opposite shore—a distance of less than three miles in places—would have split the Ottoman army in two and trapped any enemy forces positioned below that line. Of course, the best option might have been to sidestep the peninsula completely and put in at the Gulf of Saros at its northern end. An invasion force coming ashore in that broad bay would not only maroon all the Turkish troops garrisoned on Gallipoli, but would then have a virtually unimpeded path through easy countryside to Constantinople, just 100 miles away. This was certainly the greatest fear of General Liman von Sanders, the German commander recently appointed by the Turkish government to oversee the Dardanelles defense; in anticipation of a landing at Saros, he had placed his headquarters and fully a third of his army there.

The one possibility that Sanders tended to discount entirely was a landing at Gallipoli’s southern tip, simply because the most basic rules of military logic—even mere common sense—argued against it. Not only would a landing force there be vulnerable to defenders dug in on the heights above them, but completely exposed to whatever long-range Turkish artillery remained operable in their nearby fortresses. And even if such a force managed to scale the heights and seize those forts, the Turkish defenders could then begin a slow withdrawal up the peninsula, throwing up new trenchlines as they went, neatly replicating the static trench warfare that had so paralyzed the armies on the Western Front. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a worse landing site most anywhere on the three-thousand-mile-long Mediterranean coast of the Ottoman Empire—yet it was precisely here that Med-Ex was going ashore.

Along with condescension for the enemy, always a perilous mind-set for an army, that decision was apparently born of sheer bureaucratic obduracy. Since the Dardanelles campaign had been conceived as a naval operation, the success or failure of the expanded mission would continue to be judged through the narrow lens of its original objective—clearing the straits—leaving its planners quite blind to the idea of trying a different approach that might ultimately achieve the same end. Incredibly, it seems the Gallipoli strategists had less rejected alternative landing sites than never seriously considered them.

A look at the map does make one wonder why the British were on the peninsula at all. How did it go?

By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta. So bewildered was General von Sanders by his enemy’s idiocy that for the next day he remained convinced the southern landing was a mere feint and that the main invasion force was still coming elsewhere. This left it to a local Ottoman divisional commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, acting on his own accord, to repeatedly hurl his men against the invaders clinging to their tiny beachheads in an attempt to throw them back into the sea. The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying.

The author quotes “the old maxim that war can kill all things except bad ideas.”

We’re not fighting in trenches anymore, but I wonder if we’re pretty much doing the same thing as the British did, only in slow-motion.

Full post, including comments

Some Christmas gift ideas, while there is still time…

For the Hillary supporter still weeping with grief… a mail order from the Trump Winery (I recommend New World Reserve (red) or their award-winning sparkling wine). Also fun to bring to dinner parties (assuming you don’t want to be invited back).

A custom photo puzzle from Ravensburger (they will do up to 1500 pieces from your own photo or photos (you can collage them on their site)).

For the photographer with children… Sony A6500 (great image quality and good autofocus).

For a favorite dog: Chuckit Kick Fetch ball.

For the chef: this amazing $12 bread knife.

Readers: Perhaps based on stuff you’ve bought recently and enjoyed, what are your best Christmas gift ideas?

Full post, including comments

I was driving Domestic Senior Management’s car to the instant oil-change place yesterday. We are having our first cold snap in Boston this year, with highs below freezing and lows down to about 13F. On the way I passed the Quick and Clean car wash and decided the vehicle needed an interior vacuum and window cleaning. No doubt emboldened by Trump, the car wash owners had applied a glass ceiling to the floor. Based on wardrobe and hairstyle, there were exactly zero employees identifying as women working on the detail crew, which conducts its work entirely outdoors from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

[Note that this gender-based discrimination should not be confused with the pre-Trump Sex discrimination at the car wash that I observed back in August, before the entire world changed.]

Full post, including comments

In “One Job Is Enough. Sell the Hotel,” the New York Times Editorial Board gives direct instructions to Donald Trump. Haven’t we just seen about a year of the Times writing about how Trump and his supporters wouldn’t listen to their intellectual superiors (e.g., the Editorial Board of the NYT) and switch to supporting Hillary instead? Now that he has prevailed against all predictions (including my own!), why would Trump be waking up every morning and saying “Let me just check the NYT to see if my intellectual superiors have any agenda items for me today”?

[Separately, why is divesting just this one hotel good enough? The federal government does business in Chicago, New York, and other cities where there are Trump hotels. If Trump were so motivated he could enrich himself simply by scheduling a talk to a high school in Chicago. The entourage of Secret Service and sycophants that follows the President would tie up 500 or 1000 hotel rooms in the city. Even if none of these were booked in the Trump Hotel Chicago, that hotel would be able to charge higher rates for the night(s) that President Trump was in town.]

Related:

• New York Times suggests that companies other than the New York Times hire transgender workers
• White people at the New York Times bemoan the fate of the black man
• Why do people who chose not to study science and math opine on the virtues of studying science and math?

Full post, including comments

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East gives a summary of what we’ve accomplished for $2 trillion(?) in Iraq:

Certainly, blame for all this doesn’t rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed, feverishly nurtured—by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people’s anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is “the great Satan” or the “illegitimate Zionist entity” or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. In an ironic and unforeseen way, that era now appears to be coming to an end. Beginning with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, but greatly accelerated by the so-called Arab Spring movements that have roiled the region since 2010, the established order has steadily eroded before the force of the “Arab street.” Thus far, though, that “street” has shown little sign of coalescing around any notion of Arab unity, let alone the old dream of a greater Arab nation, but very much the opposite: a reversion to the balkanized patchwork of ethnic and religious enclaves that existed under the Ottoman millet system. While no American government official will publicly admit it, Iraq today has largely devolved into three mini-states, divided along those sectarian and ethnic lines—Kurdish, Shia and Sunni—that predated the Western imperial mapmakers.

Did the Western powers do any better elsewhere?

With the overthrow of Muamar Qaddafi, Libya, too, is rapidly becoming a nation in name only, separating into the three principal tribal regions that existed even before the Ottomans. With the brutal civil war in Syria now entering its fourth year, there is open talk of further disintegration there, of the ruling Alawite minority potentially carving out a mini-nation consisting of their ancestral strongholds along the Mediterranean coast.

Full post, including comments

The Lockheed Skunk Works was pretty good at getting innovative products out the door. From Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben Rich, 1996)…

some of our inventions: the P-80, America’s first jet fighter; the F-104 Starfighter, our first supersonic jet attack plane; the U-2 spy plane; the incredible SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s first three-times-the-speed-of-sound surveillance airplane; and the F-117A stealth tactical fighter that many Americans saw on CNN scoring precision bomb strikes over Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm.

How did they do it? The style of the top manager changed pretty dramatically over the years:

[Kelly Johnson] was the toughest boss west of the Mississippi, or east of it too, suffered fools for less than seven seconds, and accumulated as many detractors as admirers at the Pentagon and among Air Force commanders. But even those who would never forgive Johnson for his bullying stubbornness and hair-trigger temper were forced to salute his matchless integrity. On several occasions, Kelly actually gave back money to the government, either because we had brought in a project under budget or because he saw that what we were struggling to design or build was just not going to work.

With [Kelly Johnson’s] chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders.

I began by loosening the leash on all my department heads. I told them what they already knew: I was not a genius like Kelly, who knew by experience and instinct how to solve the most complex technical problems. I said, “I have no intention of trying to make all the decisions around here the way that Kelly always did. From now on, you’ll have to make most of the tough calls on your own.”

So the productivity wasn’t due to a particular personal management style at the top. What about the physical set-up?

Designers lived with their designs through fabrication, assembly, and testing. Engineers couldn’t just throw their drawings at the shop people on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and walk away.

Our designers spent at least a third of their day right on the shop floor; at the same time, there were usually two or three shop workers up in the design room conferring on a particular problem. That was how we kept everybody involved and integrated on a project. My weights man talked to my structures man, and my structures man talked to my designer, and my designer conferred with my flight test guy, and they all sat two feet apart, conferring and kibitzing every step of the way.

The office space allocated to Kelly’s Skunk Works operation was a narrow hallway off the main production floor, crowded with drilling machines and presses, small parts assemblies, and the large assembly area which served as the production line. There were two floors of surprisingly primitive and overcrowded offices where about fifty designers and engineers were jammed together behind as many desks as a moderate-size room could unreasonably hold.

All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor. A stone’s throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions.

Twenty designers were stashed away in choking work rooms up on the second floor. The windows were sealed shut, and in those days nearly everyone smoked.

Except for the smoking, not too different Facebook-style Open-pit Coding!

[The “engineers have to be close to the factory” principle seems to indicate a poor long-term prognosis for U.S. engineering employment (the E in STEAM!). If the engineers need to be close to the factory and the factory needs to be in Mexico or China then eventually the engineers will have to be Mexican and Chinese as well.]

Related:

• High CEO pay is one reason that American GDP growth rate is so low?
• Development of the First Stealth Fighter

Full post, including comments

“Trump’s election stole my desire to look for a partner” is an interesting Washington Post article.

The author describes herself as having had “[e]nough of this dating unavailable men a half-decade younger than me”. Let’s assume that “dating” translates to “having sex.” The young cougar is now “ready to look for a partner” who is “an equal” (i.e., same age or older?). She has “two children and our needy dog.” She says she has “no idea what a supportive partner would even look like”.

She says that “on [her] own” she “can support [her] family.” This is fortunate because since she apparently has no “partner” of any kind, Perhaps her husband died and she and the kids were left without life insurance? But then who babysits the kids while she is having sex with these “half-decade younger” men?

I found the author, Stephanie Land, on Facebook. Here’s a May 8 posting:

It seems that she is a big Sheryl Sandberg fan. Also, though she has no “partner,” she is cashing child support checks on a regular basis. Perhaps due to an imperfect understanding of Montana family law, which does provide for potentially unlimited child support profits, Ms. Land says that she is struggling financially despite receiving these checks from a non-partner. Could it be that the father of these kids, when he is not writing checks to Ms. Land, is also caring for them every other weekend, thus facilitating the dates with younger men? Why doesn’t he then qualify as at least a financial partner in Ms. Land’s journey of single motherhood?

[Actually perhaps there are two different fathers for the two kids (generally the best financial strategy)? One of the cashflow-positive kids is 9 and one is 2. The author says “I’ve been on my own with my kids for most of the past decade”. Was she actually “on [her] own” when the 2-year-old was conceived?]

Now that Americans have elected someone other than Sheryl Sandberg to occupy the White House (Sheryl for 2020?), what’s left for this mom?

I’ve lost the desire to attempt the courtship phase. The future is uncertain. I am not the optimistic person I was on the morning of Nov. 8, wearing a T-shirt with “Nasty Woman” written inside a red heart. It makes me want to cry thinking of that. Of seeing my oldest in the shirt I bought her in Washington, D.C., that says “Future President.”

There is no room for dating in this place of grief. Dating means hope. I’ve lost that hope in seeing the words “President-elect Trump.”

On Facebook she says that she will be at a conference in Washington, D.C. on December 12 (“How Progressives Can Defend the Working Class in the Trump Era”). In case she does meet a higher-income “date” there among the “progressives”, her May 8th financial woes might dissipate (see Real World Divorce for the variation in potential child support profits among D.C., Maryland, and Virginia).

Full post, including comments

During Election 2016, the Trumpenfuhrer-elect harped on the fact that U.S. GDP is growing only at about the same rate as the population. I.e., we’re not getting wealthier on a per-capita basis.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben Rich, 1996) was written by the manager of what became a sizable business:

The stealth fighter brought in more than $6 billion. Refurbishing the U-2 and the Blackbird brought in $100 million. By my fifth year I was heading a small, secret R & D outfit whose annual earnings placed it among the Fortune 500.

As an officially crabby old person, though, he was pessimistic about the future:

There are very few strong-willed individualists in the top echelons of big business—executives willing or able to decree the start of a new product line by sheer force of personal conviction, or willing to risk investment in unproven technologies. As salaries climb into the realm of eight-figure annual paychecks for CEOs, and company presidents enjoy stock options worth tens of millions, there is simply too much at stake for any executive turtle to stick his neck out of the shell.

What’s changed 20 years later? The “stock options worth tens of millions” are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars for some CEOs. What is the incentive to put them at risk by funding a radical product?

Related:

• Harry Potter and the $100 million/year manager (my theory that paying a CEO a lot will reduce productivity because it is time-consuming to be a rich person)

Full post, including comments

Trump said that $4 billion was too much for a couple of Boeing 747s in executive configuration to replace the current Air Force One Boeing 747s. If everything goes according to plan, unlike any other recent military procurement project, the planes will be delivered circa 2024.

My friends on Facebook are outraged:

Another blatant lie. [over an article about how it is really only $170 million]

In addition to the distorted picture that Trump paints, it’s the fact that he engages in this type of self-aggrandizing behavior. Obama cancelled helicopter orders during his administration but he did not feel the need to tweet about it to make himself look good. [the “distorted picture” is that government spending on military aircraft tends to be wasteful?]

Obama cancelled orders too. Trump distorts facts and lies and he feels the need to get on Twitter to make himself look good. Not my idea of a grounded leader. Plus now it’s coming out that he was pissed off at Boeing. He really is a 13-year old boy, developmentally.

To avoid being defriended, a middle-aged white guy from Michigan was careful to disclaim any personal support for Trump before commenting with the following:

Forget about AF-1, the beauty of the statement by Trump is that it has provoked a reflexive response of Boeing support among progressives which couldn’t have been larger than had they made the announcement that they’d be withdrawing from bidding any future military contracts. Five minutes ago, Boeing was emblematic of corporate greed; now they’re a beleaguered business just trying to break even.

If Trump can be induced to say he wants to cancel the Navy, they’ll be demanding a 600-ship fleet by next Tuesday.

Full post, including comments