Category: Government

Why haven’t all of the Minneapolis police officers and local politicians been fired?

by philg

By touching off riots throughout the U.S., the incompetence of the Minneapolis city government has cost Americans who live elsewhere at least billions of dollars (insurance industry estimate; some color from the Daily Mail) in the short run. Owners of property in other cities may be out tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the long run, as people decide that they’d rather live and work in suburbs and/or small towns, thus escaping both Covid-19 and civil unrest.

Imagine if the Minneapolis police department had been a Roman legion. After the killing of Justine Diamond (“Noor had been lauded in the past by Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges and the local Somali community as one of the first Somali-American police officers in the area”), it would have been time for decimation (every tenth officer killed by others in the legion). After the murder of George Floyd, surely it would have been time to kill the entire legion due to the disgrace and costs imposed on the Republic/Empire.

Of course, justice isn’t as harsh today as it was in Ancient Rome. However, given the above-market wages, health care, and pension benefits paid, the entire Minneapolis Police Department could be easily replaced at a substantial savings to taxpayers. Why not fire the entire force immediately as a modern-day substitute for how these people would have been punished in the time of Trajan? State police and National Guard units can fill in until the city has had a chance to hire the next class. Also fire anyone in city politics with any supervisory responsibility for the police, right up to and including the mayor. Maybe it would take a replacement police force a few years to become fully effective, but the example would be helpful to other cities and maybe people around the U.S. wouldn’t be angry enough to keep rioting if they saw that the people responsible for the Minneapolis murder had faced some actual consequences.

(As it happens, I was in Minneapolis this week! Glorious plans to hang out downtown were revised in favor of holing up in the Hampton Inn, Eden Prairie. After two nights locked into my room (one of 6 occupied out of 105), with only occasional escapes to nearby strip malls, I had little trouble understanding why those who’ve been locked down in small apartments are rioting. Except for the nice Beaver below (Flying Cloud Airport), the scenery was bleak (leavened slightly by the fact that restaurants are now open for outdoor dining). There was a nightly curfew even in suburban Eden Prairie.)

Readers: What do you think? Should the Minneapolis Police Department be warmly told “Thanks for your service” and sent home with two weeks of severance pay? Also, should Minneapolis be cut off from Federal funds for the next 5-10 years? U.S. taxpayers will have to pay $billions to rebuild the cities trashed as a consequence of what happened in Minneapolis. Why can’t the folks there (“some very fine people”) pay for their own services with local and state $$ for the next 5-10 years?

Related:

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If they hadn’t been unionized, would the Minneapolis police have killed George Floyd?

by philg

Just as I was planning a trip to Minneapolis, the city is embroiled in civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd by four police officers (far more upsetting to me than Covid-19, actually).

Facebook friends who are Democrats blame the murder of Mr. Floyd on Republicans and Donald Trump, which seems odd given that Minneapolis voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (results) and, like other unionized government workers, it seems reasonable to expect that most Minneapolis police officers would vote for Democrats.

Facebook friends who are passionate about Black Lives Matter blame the murder on white supremacy, but how many of the four police officers were actually white? And haven’t there been plenty of murders by police officers and police brutality incidents in which no white people were involved on either side?

At least two of the officers involved had a record of similar conduct, but it would have been almost impossible to fire them due to their union membership. Even in this case, where surveillance video would seem sufficient for all four officers to be arrested and put in jail to await trial for murder, Wikipedia says

The local police union expressed support of the officers involved, saying: “The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis will provide full support to the involved officers.” They also urged the public to remain calm, saying: “Now is not the time to rush to judgement and immediately condemn our officers.

[For citizens who are not police officers, the standard for being arrested and jailed in Minneapolis is apparently fairly low. An older law professor was in jail for three weeks after a false rape accusation, for example. As in a lot of family court domestic violence matters, it was a frustrated desire for cash that seems to have led to the contretemps.]

I was an expert witness on a case in which an electric utility worker for city-owned company had a multi-year track record of mistakes. He kept getting reassigned to positions where the managers thought he wouldn’t be able to do any more damage. While trying to change the password on some “protective relays”, he neglected to “open the trips” that would disconnect them from the transformer breakers while they were being reconfigured. He inadvertently wiped the relays’ configurations, rather than simply changing the passwords. Remarkably, most did not trip, but one did. The result was the multi-hour shutdown of an oil refinery (probably also shut down right now due to coronavirus fears!), leading to $9 million in damage and lost production. He is still a union member and an electric utility employee…

Maybe it is okay for unions to render workers invulnerable in jobs where the worst they can do is inflict major power outages on citizens, businesses, and industrial facilities. But why does the American public tolerate this for police departments? Presumably these four guys would have behaved differently throughout their careers if they knew that firing and losing a multi-$million pension was a realistic possibility. Why aren’t protesters demanding that the police be stripped of their union protections against termination? The average American is an employee at will. Why would that be unfair for police officers?

(Separately, who wants to meet in Eden Prairie or downtown Minneapolis, some time between Sunday evening through Tuesday morning?)

Related:

  • A 2017 killing by the same police department: “On July 15, 2017, Justine Ruszczyk, also known as Justine Damond, a 40-year-old Australian-American woman, was fatally shot by Mohamed Noor, a Somali-American Minneapolis Police Department officer, after she had called 9-1-1 to report the possible assault of a woman in an alley behind her house. … Occurring weeks after a high-profile manslaughter trial acquittal in the 2016 police shooting of Philando Castile, also in the Twin Cities metro area, the shooting exacerbated existing tensions and attracted national and international press. … Noor had been lauded in the past by Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges and the local Somali community as one of the first Somali-American police officers in the area. … In two years as a police officer, Noor had three formal complaints against him, two of which, as of September 2017, were pending resolution. In a separate case from May 2017, he was being sued for allegedly assaulting a woman while on duty.”
  • Update: “Police Unions And Civilian Deaths” (NPR, June 3)… “After police officers gained access to collective bargaining rights, there was a substantial increase in the killings of civilians — overwhelmingly, nonwhite civilians.”
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Judge questions how marijuana shops came to be essential

by philg

From the Chicago Sun Times, the transcript of a southern Illinois judge’s ruling against some of the governor’s dictates:

Selling pot is essential but selling goods and services at a family- owned business is not. Pot wasn’t even legal and pot dispensaries didn’t even exist in this state until five months ago and, in that five months, they have become essential but a family-owned business in existence for five generations is not.

Doctors and experts say different things weekly. The defendant cites models in his opposition. The only thing experts will agree on is that all models are wrong and some are useful. The Centers for Disease Control now says the virus is not easily spread on surfaces.

The Science-denying judge is like a black-robed version of Adley!

He highlights some apparent logical contradictions:

A family of six can pile in their car and drive to Carlyle Lake without contracting COVID but, if they all get in the same boat, they will. We are told that kids rarely contract the virus and sunlight kills it, but summer youth programs, sports programs are cancelled. Four people can drive to the golf course and not get COVID but, if they play in a foursome, they will.

Sadly, he does not attempt to answer the stay-at-home mom’s question: “If masks work, why aren’t we back at work? If masks don’t work, why are we being asked to wear them?”

He does throw in some philosophy:

The defendant in this case orders you to stay home and pronounces that, if you leave the state, you are putting people in danger, but his family members traveled to Florida and Wisconsin because he deems such travel essential. … When laws do not apply to those who make them, people are not being governed, they are being ruled.

A good thought to ponder as Americans make their way to their neighborhood marijuana stores….

I’m still waiting to hear what the standard is for terminating young healthy Americans’ First Amendment right of assembly. If one “expert” predicts that 10 million people will die unless young healthy people are imprisoned, that’s sufficient for a governor to imprison them? How about 10 experts predicting 1 million deaths? What about 100 experts predicting 200,000 deaths and the potential for a shutdown to defer 50,000 of those deaths by a year? Are there any thresholds for how many experts one needs or what death rate (can’t use absolute number due to rapid population growth) justifies the suspension of what had been Constitutional rights?

(And what if there are experts on the other side? Is the former chief scientist of the European CDC outweighed by one American academic forecasting unprecedented doom and demanding shutdown? How about all 15 epidemiologists on the Swedish government’s team? Against those 15, how many Americans does it take for a governor to say “the science is settled so I will terminate the First Amendment”? How about Sunetra Gupta and her team at Oxford? Is a statement by Dr. Fauci worth 20X a statement by Professor Gupta?)

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Why are states hiring contact tracers when they have idle teachers and librarians?

by philg

From NPR:

In all, 44 states and the District of Columbia now have plans to expand their contact tracing workforce, reaching a total of 66,197 workers — an increase by 30,000 of the number that were planned last week when we first published.

Several states that took our survey are making big efforts to shore up their contact tracing workforces. Notable examples include Louisiana and Kentucky, which are both planning to hire 700 people; Texas, which has 1,150 contact tracers and is hiring another 2,850 to start; and Kansas, which plans to bring on 400.

If public schools, libraries, and other state government functions are shut down, shouldn’t states have millions of idle people currently on the payroll? Why would they need to hire more instead of just providing some training to a current state worker who doesn’t have a lot on his/her/zer/their plate?

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Security clearances during the coronapanic

by philg

A friend from graduate school needs a security clearance for some work that he is doing (I guess I can’t ask what!). An investigator telephoned me to check out his story and mine. She said that this would have been an in-person interview (which she prefers) during ordinary times, but that it was all phone-based due to coronaplague.

When our enemies have mined out all of our secrets five years from now, will that turn out to have been a hidden cost of the shutdown?

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Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition?

by philg

Back in 2016, I wrote “Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.?”, pointing out various advantages for American society if we could reduce alcohol consumption. This proposal was not well-received!

What about in the Age of Corona? Technocrats are gearing up for a massive testing and tracing operation. Example: “Here’s A Way To Contain Covid-19 And Reopen The Economy In As Little As One Month” (Forbes, by a Boston University econ professor). Excerpts:

The solution is PCR group-household testing of all American households every week. … If a household tests negative, each household member would be notified to go to their local pharmacy to receive a green wristband coated to change to red after one week.

This system is voluntary. But if you choose to have your household tested and receive your green wristband, you’ll be permitted by your employer to return to work, by your teachers and professors to return to school, and by proprietors to enter their restaurants, shops, cafes, etc. You’ll also be allowed to frequent the beach, attend concerts, go to the movies, …

Any household that tests positive will be required by the local board of health to quarantine in place for two weeks and then be re-tested. Households that don’t voluntarily get tested will be free to come and go as they wish. But without their green bracelets, they will have a hard time entering into workplaces and other establishments. Employers who hired the untested could face legal liability. The same holds for any business serving the public who lets someone onto their premises without a green bracelet.

My Dutch friend: “This will be just like it was for Jews after the Nuremberg Laws and similar. They were perfectly free, but couldn’t run a business, buy a movie ticket, or go to school.”

Electronic bracelets can also work: “People-tracking wristbands tested to enforce lockdown” (BBC). See also “US, Israel, South Korea, and China look at intrusive surveillance solutions for tracking COVID-19” (zdnet)

Covid-19 is a pernicious disease. It has killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide so far. But what if we could use the above technology and infrastructure to stop a much more destructive killer: alcohol. WHO says that 3 million deaths worldwide are attributed to alcohol. The average age of a death with/from Covid-19 in Massachusetts is 82 and more than 98 percent of those who died had “underlying conditions.” Alcohol often kills people who could have lived for another 40-100 years. In terms of life-years, therefore, we could save many more by discouraging alcohol consumption.

(Is Covid-19 different because an alcohol-related problem is due to a failure of personal responsibility? Consider the child of an alcoholic or a passenger in a car struck by a drunk driver.)

Given that people can brew their own beer or distill their own vodka, presumably it is not possible to achieve a 100 percent reduction in alcohol consumption. But if restaurants, bars, and airlines (to the extent any are left) were not offering alcohol to every customer and there were no convenient liquor stores (“essential”!), wouldn’t it be fair to expect at least a 10 or 20 percent reduction in alcohol-related deaths? (marijuana consumption increased following legalization in Washington State; shouldn’t we expect alcohol use to be reduced following prohibition?)

Since Americans have now decided that “saving lives” is more important than what used to be considered individual rights… If we succeed with alcohol prohibition using test/trace tech, why not use the same technology to attack HIV/AIDS, which has killed more than 700,000 Americans? (Covid-19 would have to kill 7 million Americans to take away a comparable number of life-years, due to the much younger age at which HIV/AIDS victims perish.) There continue to be 6,000 deaths annually here in the U.S., which is roughly comparable to the life-years lost from 60,000 Covid-19 deaths.

None of these public health interventions were doable in the 20th century. Epidemiologists predicted that HIV/AIDS would spread beyond the LGBTQIA+ community and kill millions of Americans. White upper-middle-class single Americans were terrified in the 1980s by this disease that merited cover stories of TIME magazine multiple times. Nobody would have tolerated the criminalization of sex outside of marriage in order to “save lives”. Today, however, there is no limit on the power of the government when there is a public health goal. (Maybe outlaw all sexual activity? If people want children they can be imported via immigration and/or produced locally and without HIV risk via IVF.)

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Donutnomics during the Coronaplague

by philg

I caught up recently with my source for “Fast-food economics in Massachusetts: Higher minimum wage leads to a shorter work week, not fewer people on welfare”. He owns donut shops and, following minimum wage hikes, had workers asking for their hours to be cut so that they could continue to be eligible for various forms of welfare, including means-tested housing and health insurance subsidies.

What’s going on during coronaplague? “Business is down 50 percent,” he replied. “But we should be able to get a loan from the government that will pay for two months of salaries.”

What’s the main challenge right now? “Almost all of my workers could make more collecting unemployment than by continuing to work for me,” he said. This has created a delicate situation. Given that unemployment is now more lucrative than full-time work, does he lay off the best workers, rewarding them financially for their high effort and dedication to his business? Or does he lay off his least productive workers, thus inadvertently rewarding them financially for their weak efforts and lack of dedication?

How about around the rest of the neighborhood? Other than the supermarket, our town has one source of food that remains open: a pizza and sub shop that has a few tables, but was always primarily a take-out business (it occupies half of a gas station). The owner-chef says that business is down 60 percent.

Readers: Are you as surprised as I was by these numbers? Most donut sales are drive-through and/or takeout to begin with. Wouldn’t people want to escape their houses, enjoy a traffic-free 5-minute trip to the local donut shop, and come back with a delicious coffee and donut? And why are pizza/sub sales down? I have a tough time believing that our neighbors have finally learned to use their $250,000 dream kitchens.

A neighbor is an accountant for small-to-medium-sized businesses here in Massachusetts. He reports that every employer with whom he works is besieged by employees, especially the part-time and low-wage ones. Are they nervous about the future of the economy and want extra hours and overtime pay so that they can save up? No. Like the donut slingers, they want to be laid off because they can achieve a similar or higher spending power by collecting conventional Massachusetts unemployment plus $600 per week from the Federales.

Consider someone who works 25 hours per month at $20 per hour, helping out a retail store during busy hours. That’s $500/month, which would entitle the worker to roughly $200/month in benefits in the event of a layoff. Right now, however, unemployment will pay closer to $2,800/month.

How about a full-time minimum wage worker? Let’s call that 172 hours times $12 per hour = $2,064 per month. Unemployment will pay over $3,000 per month.

I met a 24-year-old who works for a national retail chain that is headquartered in Massachusetts. She has been cut from five days per week in the office to two days per week working from home. “I hope this lasts through the summer,” she said. “I’m making at least $200 extra per week while hardly doing anything.” (She has a 24-year-old friend, meanwhile, who has been terrified by reports of young people cut down by Covid-19. The slender healthy young person will not leave her apartment.)

How typical are these experiences in which an employee actually has a higher spending power by being laid off? “The $600 Unemployment Booster Shot, State by State” (nytimes) says “Workers in more than half of states will receive, on average, more in unemployment benefits than their normal salaries”:

It looks as though there are some strange bedfellows in this table. New Hampshire and New York, for example, are two of the states that offer the highest reward for continuing to work (still a minimal difference in spending power compared to playing Xbox and watching Netflix all day).

One of the main themes of the Bell Curve (1994) is that American society becomes more unfriendly each year to those whose IQ is below average. I wonder if this is being amply proven by the current landscape of work-versus-welfare alternatives. The Bell Curve says that in the old days it wasn’t that helpful to have a high IQ. If you were born a peasant you could think big thoughts while digging for potatoes. It wasn’t that harmful to have a low IQ. If you worked harder you’d get paid more. If you committed a crime, of which there was a short list of easily understood prohibitions, you’d get imprisoned. Our modern world, on the other hand, has thousands of crimes, many of which are non-obvious and/or not regularly punished. Would a person with an IQ of 90 be able to figure out that saying “I didn’t do it” to a law enforcement officer could result in 5 years in prison (Brogan v. United States), more than pleading guilty to killing a fiance in order to get the insurance cash?

Pre-plague Massachusetts already presented a non-obvious landscape for planning out a life of earning. Having a child and living on welfare yields a greater spending power than working at a median wage job (CATO analysis). Having sex with a married dermatologist yields a greater spending power than going to medical school and working as a primary care doctor (our family law). Having sex with three different already-married above-median-income partners and collecting child support from each yields a substantially greater spending power than marrying a median-income partner. Add to all of these we now have a situation in which workers are much better off financially being fired than continuing to work. And, of course, they’re also way better off in terms of exposure to the dreaded coronavirus if they stay home and play videogames or watch TV.

We have a similar situation for business owners. The smartest and most successful business owners had their free government cash arranged within days. They had no trouble figuring out which bank to use, what forms to fill out, etc. (The biggest banks helped the biggest customers, taking advantage of the fact that a hotel or restaurant chain with 100 directly owned locations was considered 100 “small businesses” rather than one big business.) The honest, but not-too-bright, small business operator? He/she/ze/they was mostly out of luck.

How about people who want to collect conventional welfare? Here’s part of an email from our local school:

The events of the COVID-19 emergency may have changed financial circumstances for your family. As a consequence, your students may now be eligible for the Free and Reduced Price School Meals (FRL) program. If they are eligible for the FRL program, the national Pandemic-EBT program may provide additional benefits in the form of food assistance cards.

Details of the Pandemic-EBT program may be found at https://www.mass.gov/info-details/pandemic-ebt-p-ebt. It is a supplemental program provided through the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance. Eligibility is based on the FRL status, so, if your family circumstances have changed, you may wish to apply for enrollment in the Free and Reduced Price School Meals (FRL) program.

The application form is attached. You may fill out the Word document and upload the completed application file electronically to the Free & Reduced Lunch Application Submission Folder. That is the preferred application method. You could also print out the PDF version, fill it out, sign, and scan it, then upload it electronically to the Free & Reduced Lunch Application Submission Folder. Either method provides for the confidentiality of your information.

So… as long as you have a scanner and/or an Office 365 subscription, free meals will be coming your way! Here’s an excerpt:

Confusing: Each of your six children can be “foster”, “homeless”, “migrant”, and/or “runaway”. If a child has run away, however, how would there be an adult filling out this form?

(The form also says “We are required to ask for information about your children’s race and ethnicity. This information is important and helps to make sure we are fully serving our community.” Dare we ask if the white poverty industry employees will try to prepare ethnically appropriate meals for each child? It will like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino trying to make Hmong meals for the neighbors?)

Is this truly accessible to a person with a below-average IQ?

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Heteronormative Prejudice and Gender Binarism from the Census Bureau

by philg

Note the priority given to the options for a person who might live in the same house or apartment:

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Textbook Heteronormativity.

The gender ID choices:

Textbook Gender Binarism.

Aside from the agency’s failure to get up to speed on LGBTQIA+ issues, I have to say that Census has given us a good example of web design. Maybe it is best not to try to figure out what these forms cost the taxpayer, but the overall IT budget is in the $billions.

A 2019 article, “2020 U.S. census plagued by hacking threats, cost overruns”:

The effort to move the census online aims to streamline the counting process, improve accuracy, and rein in cost increases as the population rises and survey response rates decline. Adjusting for 2020 dollars, the 1970 census cost $1.1 billion, a figure that rose steadily to $12.3 billion by 2010, the most recent count. The 2020 tally is projected at $15.6 billion, including a $1.5 billion allowance for cost overruns.

U.S. population was 205 million in 1970 compared to 330 million today. So a 61% rise in population corresponds to a 1400% increase in cost.

We are informed by the New York Times that Vladimir Putin does all of our voting for us (but it is the Chinese who post coronapanic on Facebook). Will Mr. Putin also fill out our Census forms?

T-Rex’s work, which includes security, data storage and performance testing, is projected to cost taxpayers up to $1.4 billion, according to the census budget.

So if the $1.4 billion in spending includes a firewall, we will have to complete these forms ourselves…

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If you thought you’d get masks and ventilators faster through the Defense Production Act

by philg

When friends on Facebook expressed anger that Donald Trump had not used the Defense Production Act to expedite production of N95 masks and ventilators, I would endear myself to them by linking to “The Navy spent $30B and 16 years to fight Iran with a littoral combat ship that doesn’t work” (Australian-designed high-speed ferry with some guns on the deck).

I think that I might have a new favorite article regarding military speed… “The 9/11 Trial: Why Is It Taking So Long?” (nytimes):

The trial of five men accused of plotting the attacks had been scheduled for early next year — almost 20 years after the hijackings. Now even that schedule won’t be met. Here are the reasons.

But they have yet to come to trial. The military’s legal proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have lurched from setback to setback, disappointing the families of the victims who have watched in frustration and dismay. Then over the summer, a military judge finally set a timetable toward a trial that envisioned a start date early next year.

Now, that schedule has suffered a one-two punch that promises more delay. First, the coronavirus crisis has cut off most access to Guantánamo Bay, complicating the work of the prosecutors, defense teams, judiciary and support staff who shuttle between the base and the mainland. Then the judge abruptly announced last month that he was retiring from the Air Force and would leave the case next week.

The crude court compound the Pentagon built at Guantánamo as a temporary outpost of the war on terrorism turned out to be expensive and inadequate.

Everyone but the men accused of the crime commute to Guantánamo from Washington, and points beyond for one- to three-week hearing sessions that have been plagued by flight delays, cancellations, mold-damaged offices and communications failures.

Judges have also canceled hearings because of hurricanes, health issues, higher court challenges and, recently, the coronavirus.

Maybe we can convince Joe Biden to promise to close Gitmo!

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Invest in Estonian-style e-governance to be ready for the next plague?

by philg

Quite a few Boston-area businesses have shut down their physical offices. Employees of Amazon, for example, are working from home. Towns and cities, however, can’t close down their respective Town Halls and City Halls because the only way to access quite a few government services is to show up in person. The same enterprise of state/local government that tries, via its public health department, to get everyone to stay home, may ironically end up being one of the only information processing operations that insists that everyone show up and get within contagious distance.

Supposedly Estonia allows citizens to do almost anything that they’d do at a city hall from the disease-free safety of their own homes.

The U.S. track record for government-run IT is admittedly mixed, e.g., with the $1 billion healthcare.gov insurance site. But maybe if we could adopt the Estonian system unmodified for state and local transactions we would be able to save time in non-plague periods and save lives in plague periods.

Readers: What do you think? Should people have to brave coronavirus to get (or issue) a building permit?

Related:

  • “Estonia, the Digital Republic” (New Yorker, 2017)
  • e-Estonia (Wikipedia)
  • e-governance (from Estonians themselves): “Estonia is probably the only country in the world where 99% of the public services are available online 24/7. E-services are only impossible for marriages, divorces and real-estate transactions – you still have to get out of the house for those.” (don’t get too excited about those family law transactions; they are not as lucrative as in the U.S. From a 2017 post: “In all three Baltic countries I learned that having sex with the richest person in the country would yield only about 200 euros per month in child support” (similar to nearby Sweden))
  • “Estonia: Tough campaign stop for Bernie Sanders”
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