Category: Uncategorized

Audi first at taking consumers beyond the Model T suspension? Short Tesla?

by philg

The new 2019 Audi A8 (Car and Driver and also official press release) is on track to be the first production car with an active suspension (explanatory video), which would be the first real innovation in this area since 1906 (history). In addition to a smooth ride over bumps, active suspension will improve the vehicle’s handling (important when you’re going 15 mph in traffic?) and will also lift up the side of the car so that the floor structure absorbs impact from a side collision rather than simply the doors.

The other claimed innovation is that the Audi will drive itself in traffic jams up to roughly 37 mph. (But don’t Teslas already do this? Audi says “The new A8 is the first production automobile to have been developed specially for highly automated driving.” Why aren’t the Teslas the first?)

What characterizes driving in the U.S.?

Isn’t this Audi then the perfect car for us? The active suspension will help us glide unaware over the potholes. The autopilot will let us watch Amazon Prime Video during our 5 mph 2-hour freeway commutes. (I still like my Personal solution to traffic jams: Motorhome and Driver, though of course to match evolving standards of polite discourse that 2006 posting should be revised from “illegal immigrant” to “undocumented immigrant”.)

Is it time to short Tesla? It should be easier for Audi to buy a Chinese battery and Siemens motor and stuff those into their cars than for Tesla to match this kind of suspension technology that can completely change the driving experience. (Though active suspension historically requires a huge amount of power and therefore it might not be compatible with a pure electric vehicle. ClearMotion is a Boston-area company that tries to recover some of this energy when a vehicle hits a bump.) Audi already has three electric models coming out within the next three years (electrek).

With the exception of Tesla, U.S. car companies were never leaders in engineering or innovation, right? Why isn’t the 1995 car market the best estimate of what the car market will look like in 2025? In that case, the engineering/innovation leaders will be German and Japanese while American brands will churn out cars that are cheaper and 5-10 years out of date in terms of engineering. That’s a problem for Tesla, which sells a premium-priced product based on advanced engineering. If the argument is “a modern car is all about software and Americans have been leaders in software,” what stops Audi, Honda, and other engineering leaders from buying American software and/or setting up software development labs in the U.S.? Even if software is critical to a modern car it is still a small portion of the cost, right?

Readers: What do you think? Is this new Audi A8 a techno tour de force? If so, does that spell trouble for Tesla?

[Inspiration to get the extended warranty. A friend’s recent Facebook post:

We’ve got a 2008 Audi A3. Low mileage (33k, give or take), but now with a dead high-beam on one side. Turns out, this isn’t just a replace-the-bulb and you’re good sort of repair. Nope, have to replace the whole damn assembly, $1500 part plus labor, and we’re talking about a car which is maybe worth $8000. … Repair or trade in / upgrade?

]

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College sexual assault tribunals back in the news

by philg

Betsy DeVos is taking a break from running what is essentially a massive financial services enterprise (the Department of “Education” spends the vast majority of its money on student loans to subsidize American colleges and universities). She’s contemplating dismantling the Obama Administration regulation that forced schools to set up amateur-run sexual assault tribunals with a 51-percent standard of proof. See “Campus Rape Policies Get a New Look as the Accused Get DeVos’s Ear” (nytimes) for example.

I think the best source of information about this topic is found in Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football), a book by John Krakauer. The book gives the texture of modern campus life (debauched to the extent that the Roman would have been shocked) as well as the texture of the tribunals and regular criminal courts handling sexual assault allegations. You can learn a lot from the book even if you don’t agree with Krakauer that standards for convicting men should be much lower (he does not like either presumption of innocence or “beyond a reasonable doubt” when it comes to litigation following heterosexual sex).

It turns out the government has figured out the same thing that you will after reading Krakauer’s book, i.e., not every American is addicted to OxyContin… college students are usually too drunk to get through the child-proof pill bottle caps:

“Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’” [Candice E. Jackson, the top civil rights official at the Department of Education] said.

I’m wondering if the Trump Administration can have any practical influence in this area. There are currently three systems that operate in parallel. A person accused of rape can be prosecuted criminally in a criminal court (penalty if guilty = prison; penalty if found innocent = $1 million spent on legal fees) and simultaneously prosecuted within the university (penalty = being kicked out without a degree and forfeiting $200,000+ in tuition and fees paid) and simultaneously sued in civil court (penalty = paying a guaranteed $1 million in legal fees to defend the lawsuit through trial and then, if a jury finds 51% likelihood of assault, paying additional money to the plaintiff). The civil and criminal courts aren’t going anywhere. But suppose that Secretary DeVos writes a “Dear Colleague” letter saying “You don’t have to run these tribunals anymore. You can tell people who’ve been assaulted to call 911.” Which universities are going to say “we will tear down this administrative process because we don’t care about rape anymore”?

Some comments from the Times article for the Zeitgeist (at least among Hillary Clinton supporters):

[soxared] It says here that Betsy DeVos is far less interested in sexual assaults on college campuses. She’s more interested in aiding and abetting her boss’s determination to chop down every and any Obama administrative rule, regulation, executive order or directive. She isn’t fooling anyone. Why should she care about victims of sexual predation in academic settings? Her job is to Christianize every American school in America and this charade is the merest show.

[gordy] This woman, DeVos, makes me ashamed to call myself Christian. There is nothing Christin about her shameless attitudes.

[pjswfla] There is something profoundly wrong and evil lurking in the alleged mind of Betsy Devos. She seems to be against anything that makes common sense for students, their decent education, their finances and their well being. Makes sense, come to think of it, when you consider the idiot who appointed her who denies truths – who would not know a truthful statement if it hit him in his orange mug like a brick.

[AP] During undergrad at a huge Big Ten school, I watched the ineptitude of faculty/administrators trying to manage basic behavioral issues with suboptimal results let alone rape cases. … As a woman I take offense at those who refuse to acknowledge the poor judgement and party culture of college life helps foster these crimes. While my friends and I hit the books for our honors degrees and grad school, we watched girl after girl weekend after weekend get amazingly drunk and with horror see them laugh over it and the compromising sexual situations that arose from it. … Drop the idea that young adults are “entitled” to be in college, the notion that college means partying and some voyage of exploration that focuses on gratification and pulverize the thought that a woman is unable to use her cerebral cortex to comprehend that alcohol plus a dark room at 3am with equally drunk men is a potential set up for mayhem.

[Barry] I think maybe more women ought to be armed. That might cause some males to have second thoughts before proceeding. [Now there will be alcohol, sex, and guns at the party!]

[SD] Campuses don’t generally share their outcome rates, but Stanford did on May 31: 24% of allegations were thrown out as invalid before ever getting to the investigation stage, and 50% of accused students tried in a hearing were found “not responsible”. Under a preponderance standard, that is equivalent to saying the accused was likely to be innocent. In other words, over half of the accusations were false, unfounded, or just too dubious to be investigated or to receive a decision of “responsible.” NCHERM [ National Center for Higher Education Risk Management!] reports rates of 60% (see their 2017 white paper, page 15). And those are under DCL conditions discouraging cross examination and participation by an attorney, and where there are no penalties for false testimony.

[aeg] [college students] may consider NOT proceeding with intimate behavior before a 24 or 48 hour “get acquainted” or cooling off period…or longer? Hum…no more “one night stands?” [Given the 48-hour interval, assuming that Lover N+1 is not contacted until one day after the student is finished with Lover N, this would limit a college student to no more than approximately 487 sex partners over a 4-year period.]

[Elly] My daughter’s first night away at school… Four drunk people in her dorm room have sex most of the night. [Consistent with Krakauer’s book.]

[William Case] The comments reveal that many readers think that Title IX investigations involve sexual assaults that take place on campus, but almost all take place off campus at private residences. Colleges and universities should not be held responsible for investigating crimes their students commit away from campus during non-school events.

[GSA101] Title IX, as written, prohibits Universities from failing to provide equal educational access on the basis of gender. Since extramarital sex is NOT part of the curriculum of any University that I know of, the Universities are simply not responsible for their students’ activities in that regard. Therefore, they are NOT required to investigate or adjudicate such activities.

[AMarie] Is there a reason the women can’t use the court system to get a restraining order? Those already exist, the burden of proof is much more reasonable (it isn’t a conviction, after all) and it would prevent the assailant, I mean, “accused,” from going on the campus. [Certainly this works for alimony and child support plaintiffs!]

[TOM] It is about time that people realize that perjury does occur for many reasons and no reason at all, and due process is the only way we have a hope of having justice, even if it is a slim hope. [See our litigation chapter for an attorney’s point of view on whether judges can discern the truth: “People who are crazy and sociopathic are great witnesses. They can lie without batting an eye and sound completely credible. That’s why con artists thrive. If we were good at assessing credibility none of us would ever get ripped off.”]

[Jon] I think Donald Trump is destroying this country and an oppose everything I have heard associated with him and his administration. I work towards preventing his policies being implemented. He must be stopped. But this could be the only exception among his policies… if this policy gets rescinded, then perhaps one single good thing would come out of Trump’s election. I never thought I would write something like that. [!]

[Michael] Ms. DeVos, like the man who appointed her, is manifestly unqualified for her role in government; that said, it is a huge relief that the Education Department is finally taking action to rein in the excesses of college sexual assault proceedings. In an effort to comply with the Dept’s Title IX guidelines, universities have adopted policies that would provoke alarm and outrage in any other setting: the accused are denied access to evidence in the cases levied against them; most are denied the right to counsel. Administrators who adjudicate these cases are vulnerable to campaigns of influence and intimidation by students or faculty members with a stated political interest in a guilty “verdict.” Even if exonerated, the accused are routinely forced out of their dorms and even their majors.

[Alina Starkov] Disgusting that those accused of rape are getting any sort of lenience from the government with regards to the schools.

[Deb] Somehow this doesn’t surprise. Betsy Devos’ boss publicly stated his fondness for and skill at successfully committing sexual assault, and how easily he got away with it.

It seems that even in a community of readers where nearly all could agree on the superior virtues of Hillary Clinton, they can’t agree on this issue. The commenters are divided and there seem to be almost as many rationales as commenters.

[You might ask what is my personal perspective? I wrote it up for the Times:

Stepping back from this I’m surprised that nobody asks (1) Why do colleges run dorms and sponsor fraternities/sororities and thereby take on responsibility for what happens during these parties? Why not run classrooms and labs and concentrate on education per se? (2) Why do Americans invest so much money in parking young people for four years in an environment so undemanding intellectually that they can be drunk every night?

]

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Fourteen years later, still no obvious reason for Iraq to be one country

by philg

Back in 2003 I asked why Iraqis wouldn’t logically split up into three countries: Breaking Up Countries Where Citizens Hate Each Other. Yesterday the New York Times had a headline of “At Last, Iraq Regains Mosul. But Can Iraq Itself Survive?” on the front page, linked to an article that says “tensions between the Sunni minority and the majority Shiites still undermine efforts to reunite the country” and “The Kurds, who have operated an autonomous enclave in the north since the 1990s, are moving quickly to hold a referendum on independence in September, despite pleas from American diplomats to hold off.”

My California-based Facebook friends want to secede to escape the dictatorship of Donald Trump (one posted the other day decrying deportations of undocumented immigrants, concluding that Trump “is ruining this country. … We are doomed.” (deportations are actually down compared to the numbers under Obama, but that fact doesn’t change her feelings on the subject)). The divisions in Iraq seem to be at least as large as the divisions between Bay Area Hillary-supporters and the Trumpenfuhrer.

Obviously it was a huge mistake to invade in the first place, but, taking the long view, was our biggest post-invasion mistake not immediately trying to get everyone to agree to split up?

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Sociology Masters Thesis Idea: Interview People in Traffic Jams Regarding Immigration

by philg

Boston-area traffic now includes regular mid-day traffic jams, not a huge surprise considering that the road network has more or less the same capacity as in 1990 when the population was 3.78 million (in 2015 it was 4.35 million and growing rapidly; see Boston Foundation report).

The other day I was stuck in Cambridge near Alewife. The car in front of me was a Subaru with bumper stickers celebrating Elizabeth Warren (a Native American) and unlimited immigration (“No Human Being is Illegal”).

I was wondering “Given that U.S. population growth is almost entirely driven by immigration and children of recent immigrants, and that traffic jams are driven by population growth (combined with our inability to build infrastructure), if we interviewed that Subaru driver right now, would she support immigration enthusiastically?”

So here’s an idea for a Sociology Masters project: Interview people at highway rest stops and ask

Compare the answers from times when the highway is clogged with traffic and when the highway is flowing freely.

Readers: What do you think? Would this be an interesting data set to gather?

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Two-pilot crew tries to land on a taxiway at SFO

by philg

Apropos of the discussion in the comments on my July 4 Harrison Ford on flying and freedom, a two-pilot airline crew nearly landed on a taxiway at SFO (Mercury News; contains audio clip from LiveATC) on Friday night. Unlike with Harrison Ford, the taxiway was not clear at the time, but contained four heavy airliners. And unlike with Ford, it was night, which arguably makes it easier to distinguish a taxiway from a runway (the runway has different colored lights (“different lights of color” in California?), more lights, and brighter lights). Of course, Harrison Ford was by himself whereas the Airbus A320 has two qualified pilots on board (not like the Miracle on the Hudson where Captain Sully was heroically single-piloting the machine!).

The recording suggests that it was another pilot who first figured out the situation, leading the Tower controller to issue a go-around instruction to Air Canada. Note that pilots are always free to go around themselves if they don’t like what they see on the runway (or taxiway!) or if they can’t get the aircraft stabilized (see the end of Asiana 214: Training with passengers in the back? for a discussion of stable approach criteria). This can be done even after the wheels touch the runway in a light airplane. With a heavy jet, absent an emergency, it should be started when the plane is still roughly 50′ above the ground and the engines are reasonably “spooled up.”

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Did Donald Trump cure the Zika virus?

by philg

Facebook, Apple News, New York Times, and Google News are filled 24×7 with reports of the evildoings of the Trumpenfuhrer. Can I infer from this that Donald Trump, or maybe someone else, has cured humanity of Zika virus infection? I can’t remember that last time that I saw a news article on the subject.

I did a Google News search and came up with examples such as “Pregnant or trying? Don’t let Zika guard down” (AP/Salt Lake Tribune). But if the headline says “you should pay attention to this,” doesn’t that suggest that people have, in fact, let their guard down?

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Economics of legal sex work in the U.S.

by philg

“Prostitutes speak out against Senate health bill” (CNN) is interesting for some insight into the economics of sex work in the one U.S. state where it is legal. The article explains that women who work in brothels are independent contractors, not employees:

At the helm is Alice Little, 27, who works near Carson City at Dennis Hof’s Sagebrush Ranch brothel. … “I have been fortunate to amass a strong clientele and establish myself as a financially successful businesswoman within Nevada’s legal brothel industry, but that can take time,” Little said in the release. In fact, she’s so successful Hof says she made about $500,000 last year.

Separately, the article is interesting for what it reveals about Americans’ understanding of their own government.

“Under Trumpcare insurers will be able to charge older consumers five times more than young consumers,” [Alice Little] said. “People over the age of 65 make up a very large percentage of Nevada brothel clients. If these clients are forced to pay unfairly augmented health care costs, they will not have money on hand to spend on the things that make life worth living in the first place — like sex.”

So here’s someone who is capable enough to earn $500,000 per year, pays a significant amount of her income in taxes to support Medicare, and yet is apparently unfamiliar with the details of Medicare, one of the largest U.S. government programs. As far as I know, the Obamacare versus Republicare debate doesn’t involve Medicare and therefore it wouldn’t affect the senior citizens that Ms. Little is concerned about. (If anything, Ms. Little should support a straight repeal of Obamacare due to that bill’s cuts to Medicare.) Have we built a government that is beyond the understanding of even our most capable citizens?

In fact, [the brother owner] says half of them have college educations, 20% have master’s degrees, a few have doctorate degrees and one, an Ivy League educated professor, picks up hours to help pay off her huge student loans.

I’m going to guess that this is not one of the alumni success stories featured by Princeton or Yale or wherever it was that she got her Ph.D.!

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Muslims and Christians together in the former Soviet Union

by philg

From Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:

I was eager to hear her recollections of that terrifying day, February 6, 2004, when there was a terrorist attack on the Zamoskvoretskaya line of the Moscow Metro, between the Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stops. Thirty-nine people were killed and 122 hospitalized.

[from the mother of a victim] I was always scoping out suspicious passengers on the Metro. At work, it was the only thing we talked about. What’s happening to us, dear Lord? One day, I was standing on the platform, and there was this young woman near me with a baby stroller. She had black hair, black eyes, I could tell that she wasn’t Russian. I don’t know what her ethnicity was—Chechen, Ossetian? Who was she? I couldn’t help myself and peeked into the stroller: Was there a child in there? Or was it something else? Thinking about riding in the same car as her ruined my mood. “No,” I thought. “She can go ahead, I’ll wait for the next train.” A man came up to me, “Why did you look into her stroller?” I told him the truth. “So you too, then.” …I see an unhappy girl curled up in a ball. It’s my Ksyusha. Why is she all alone? Without us? No, it’s impossible, it can’t be true. Blood on the pillow… I cry, “Ksyusha! Ksyushenka!” But she can’t hear me. She pulled a hat over her face so that I wouldn’t see her, so that I wouldn’t get scared. My little girl! She’d dreamed of being a pediatrician, but now, she’s lost her hearing. She was the most beautiful girl in her class… and now her face… For what? I’m drowning in a viscous fluid, my consciousness is splintering into shards. My legs don’t work, they feel like they’re made of cotton, and I have to be led out of the ward. The doctor screams at me. “Get ahold of yourself, or else we won’t let you see her again!” I get ahold of myself… and go back into the room… She didn’t look at me, she looked past me, off somewhere, as though she didn’t recognize me. The look in her eyes was like a suffering animal’s, it was unbearable. It was barely possible to go on living after seeing it. Now she’s hidden that look away somewhere, she’s put on an armored shell, but she’s holding all that inside of her. It’s all been imprinted on her. She’s always in that place where none of us were with her… There was an entire hospital ward full of girls like her… They’d all ridden in the same Metro car, and there they all lay… lots of students, school kids.

One operation… another… Three total! Ksyusha regained her hearing in one ear… then her fingers started working again… We lived on the border between life and death; between faith in miracles and utter injustice. It made me realize that even though I am a nurse, I know next to nothing about death. I’ve seen it many times, but only in passing. You put an IV in, listen for a pulse… Everyone thinks that medics know more about death than other people, but no.

…Everything is scarier underground. Now, I always carry a flashlight with me in my purse… …I couldn’t hear any screaming or wailing. It was completely silent. Everyone was lying in a big pile… It wasn’t scary, no… Then, slowly, people started moving. At a certain point, it dawned on me that I had to get out of there, everything was covered in chemicals, and it was all on fire. I was looking around for my backpack, it had my papers in it for school, my wallet… Shock… I was in shock… I didn’t feel any pain…

…At the top of the escalators, two women ran up to me and plastered some rag to my forehead. For some reason, I was freezing cold. They got me a chair, I sat down. I saw them asking other passengers for their belts and neckties and using them to tie off people’s wounds.

Everyone is used to it now. They turn on the TV, hear a little bit about it, then go drink their coffee…

[from the daughter, who had been attacked in the Metro] …The dead lay on the ground with their cellphones endlessly ringing… No one would brave going over and answering them.

…Why am I silent? I had been seeing this guy, we were even… he’d given me a ring… but after I told him about what happened to me… maybe it’s completely unrelated, but we ended up breaking up. I learned my lesson, it made me realize that you shouldn’t confess things to people. You get blown up, you survive, and you end up even more vulnerable and fragile than you were before. You’re branded a victim—I didn’t want people to see that brand on me…

I once had this conversation with a Chechen at the market… The war had been going on for fifteen years already, they’d come to escape it here. They’re fanning out through all of Russia… getting into every corner… even while we’re supposedly at war with them… Russia is fighting the Chechens… that so-called “special operation.” What kind of war is this? The Chechen I talked to was young: “I’m not out there fighting, lady. My wife is Russian.” I heard this story once—I’ll tell it to you, too… A Chechen girl fell in love with a Russian pilot. This handsome guy. By mutual agreement, they decided he should take her away from her parents. He brought her to Russia. They got married. Everything was by the book. Their son was born. But she kept crying and crying, she felt so bad for her parents. Finally, they wrote them a letter: “Please forgive us, we love each other…” And they sent them greetings from her Russian mother. But all those years, her brothers had been looking for her, they wanted to kill her for bringing shame on their family—she’d not only married a Russian, but a Russian who’d bombed them. Killed their people. The return address led them directly to her… One of her brothers murdered her, then another one showed up to take her body home.

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

 

 

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Teaching young Americans to be code monkeys

by philg

“How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms” (New York Times) is worth a look mostly for the disconnect between reader comments and the enthusiastic journalist.

How do humanities majors see computing?

Computer science is also essential to American tech companies, which have become heavily reliant on foreign engineers. Mr. Trump’s efforts to limit immigration make Code.org’s teach-Americans-to-code agenda even more attractive to the industry.

i.e., a person who can write a basic program in an imperative language (BASIC?) is learning “computer science.”

Which of these does Rachel Dolezal join?

Along with groups like Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code and Latina Girls Code, Code.org has worked to make the subject accessible to a diverse group of students.

Does a student with fluid gender have to bounce between the Girls Who Code classroom and the Code.org classroom?

Mr. Partovi noted that Code.org had opposed a “more extreme” coding bill in Florida that would have required students to obtain industry certification.

Nothing’s scarier to educators than a test that students might actually fail!

As with most NYT articles, the comments are the most interesting part, offering us a window into what Americans (or at least Americans who voted for Hillary) think.

As an ex-college professor I would like to point out that many students do not know when the first and second world wars occurred. That about four-fifths of Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (despite the fact that it has been in continuously in the news for over a decade). That about half of Americans believe evolution is not true. That about 40% of college undergrads need remedial classes in math and English coming into college. That a large number cannot even write a coherent essay.

Perhaps these can be solved first. They are of greater much importance than providing a specific industry with workers it “needs” (ironic considering that high tech industry throws out employees over the age of 40 [or less], when they become obsolete).

This professor does raise a good point. If programmers are in such short supply, why can’t old programmers get jobs?

To all this talk of teaching computer programming in schools to fill tech jobs, why won’t the tech companies create their own apprentice programs? Why won’t tech companies use some of their millions/billions and open up learning centers in communities where they don’t have business centers if they are truly altruistic, and not self-serving? Logical thinking can be developed through any scholarly pursuit.

Maybe the Trumpenfuhrer should call the bluffs of the Silicon Valley Hillary-supporters! He can offer to let them bring back, tax-free, some of the overseas $billions (that they were sheltering from Obama’s tax rates) as long as they spend it to train Americans for the jobs currently done by H-1B visa holders. It would be awesome to see the reaction!

[Todd Goglia] Most jobs are for “mediocre coders”. Only a tiny percentage of programming jobs entail a real understanding of advanced computer science concepts such as machine learning. Most jobs consist of getting data from a database and outputting it to a web page or getting user input from a webpage and saving it to a database.

Maybe he read Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing (or its predecessor, Database backed Web Sites) back in the 1990s!

Readers: What do you think? People have been trying since the 1970s to make programming part of K-12. Is this code.org thing going to be the initiative that succeeds?

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Relations between the sexes after the transition from socialism to capitalism

by philg

From Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:

Love? That’s not even an option… I’m not against all that happy shiny stuff, but you’re probably the first person to say that word to me in ten years. It’s the twenty-first century: It’s all about money, sex, and two smoking barrels, and here you are talking about feelings… Everyone finally got their hands on some dough, for the first time ever… I was in no hurry to get married, have kids, I’ve always put my career first. I value myself, my time, and my life. And where did you ever get the idea that men are looking for love? Ooh, love… Men consider women game, war trophies, prey, and themselves hunters. Those are the rules that have been developed over the course of centuries. And women aren’t looking for their knight in shining armor to come galloping in on a white horse—they want him on a sack of gold. A knight of indeterminate age… even a “daddy” will do… So what? Money rules the world! But I’m no prey, I’m a huntress myself… I came to Moscow ten years ago. I was wild, fired up, I told myself that I was born to be happy, that only the weak suffer, and modesty is nothing but adornment for the weak. I’m from Rostov… My parents work at a school, my father’s a chemist, and my mother’s a Russian language and literature teacher. They got married when they were in college, my father only owned one decent suit but had more than his share of ideas. Back then, that was enough to make a young girl swoon. They still love to remember how, for ages, they got by with one set of linens, one pillow, and one pair of slippers. They’d spend their nights reciting Pasternak—they knew it all by heart! “Anywhere is heaven with the one you love!” “Until the first frosts,” I’d laugh. “You have no imagination,” my mother would reply, hurt. We were your typical Soviet family: For breakfast, it was always buckwheat or noodles with butter; we only had oranges once a year, on New Year’s Eve.

It took a long time for people like my parents to realize that capitalism had already begun in earnest. Russian capitalism, young and thick-skinned, the same beast that had been put down in 1917…[ She falls into thought.] Do they understand it today? It’s hard to say… There’s one thing I know for sure: Capitalism was not what my parents ordered. No two ways about it. It’s what I ordered, it’s made for people like me, who didn’t want to stay in the cage. The young and the strong.

I was looking up… to the top of the tall ladder of life… I never dreamed of being fucked in stairwells or saunas in exchange for expensive dinners. I had a lot of admirers… I didn’t pay any attention to my peers—we could be friends, go to the library together. It was unserious and safe. I preferred older, more successful men who had already made it. They were interesting, fun, and useful.

And that’s when I met him… You could say that I loved him. This sounds like a confession, doesn’t it? [She laughs.] He was twenty years older than me, married with two sons. A jealous wife. He lived under a microscope… Now I see that love is also a kind of business, everyone is taking their own measure of risk. You have to be ready for new configurations—always! These days, few people go weak in the knees for love. Everyone saves their strength for the leap forward! For their career! In our smoking room, the girls gossip about their love lives, and if any of them has real feelings, everyone feels sorry for her—like, what an idiot, she’s head over heels.

Loneliness is freedom… Now, every day, I’m happy I’m free: Will he call or won’t he, will he come over or not? Is he going to dump me? Spare me! Those aren’t my problems anymore! So no, I’m not afraid of loneliness… What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the dentist! [She suddenly loses control.] People always lie when they talk about love… and money… They’re always lying in so many different ways. I don’t want to lie… I just don’t!

The plot? A tale as old as time… I wanted to have his baby, I got pregnant… Maybe it scared him? Men are such cowards! Whether they’re bums or oligarchs—makes no difference. They’ll go to war, start a revolution, but when it comes to love, they’re traitors.

I am filled with horror when I consider how hard you have to work to keep someone in your life. It’s like breaking rocks at a quarry! You have to forget about yourself, reject yourself, liberate yourself from yourself. There is no freedom in love. Even if you find your ideal partner, he’ll wear the wrong cologne, he’ll like fried meat and mock you for your little salads, leave his socks and pants all over the place. And you always have to suffer. Suffer?! For love… for that harmony… I don’t want to do that work anymore, it’s easier for me to rely on myself.

I’ll never be able to fall in love with a man from a dormitory town who doesn’t have any money. From a prefab ghetto, from Harlem. I hate people who grew up in poverty, their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them. I don’t like the poor, the insulted and the humiliated.

The whole ride home, he lectured me on common sense: “It’s all bullshit! Nothing but idiocy! In 1991, I was a student in Moscow, I also ran around to demonstrations. There were more of us than there are of you. And we won. We dreamed that every one of us would start a business and get rich. And what do you think happened? When the Communists were in power, I was an engineer—now I’m a cabbie. We chased out one group of bastards, and another group of bastards took their place. Black, gray, or orange, they’re all the same. In our country, power will corrupt anyone. I’m a realist. The only things I believe in are myself and my family. While the newest round of idiots tries to usher in the latest revolution, I just keep my nose to the grindstone. This month, I need to make enough money to buy my daughters new coats, and next month, my wife needs boots. You’re a pretty girl. You’d be better off finding yourself a good man and getting married.”

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

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