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My host’s BMW passed by a couple of slender women in their early 20s dressed up for a Friday night. He turned to me and said “the hunters are out.” Why would attractive young women be faced with the challenge of “hunting” for male companionship? “Remember that Russia lost 10 million men during World War II [see Wikipedia],” he replied, “and society still hasn’t gotten back to normal after three generations. Also remember that life expectancy for Russian men is 64 and for women it is 76 [CIA Factbook numbers are close]. Women dominate [are the majority] in every social group.”

What are they hunting for? “Sometimes they want money, but a lot of women have good jobs and just want to spend time with a man.” How about marriage? It sure seemed as though there were a lot of young mothers around the city [nationwide stats show median age of first marriage for a Russian woman of 25, compared to 27 in the U.S.]. “A man who earns at least $18,000 per year is considered a reasonable catch here,” he responded. “That’s enough to afford an apartment and support a family.”

Could the World War II demographic shock in fact still be felt? I met college students dating 35-year-old men (maybe because their college student peers still live with mom and dad?). I learned about a 70-year-old former Soviet administrator (i.e., not rich) with a 46-year-old girlfriend who had a middle class job and wouldn’t have needed a man for financial reasons. “Women over age 30 can forget it,” one local said. “There are fresh 18-year-old girls arriving in Moscow from all over the former Soviet regions.”

Departures from strict monogamy are not unheard of. A married man referred to the delicate etiquette of when the girlfriend meets the wife. For those with kids, the young girlfriend downtown is the “second family.” Does the girlfriend have an incentive to get pregnant and create a full-fledged “second family”? Unlike in the U.S., where child support following out-of-wedlock sex can yield $millions, the practical limit in Russia seems to be about $300 per month. If a girlfriend is getting more than that in the form of, e.g., free rent, she has no financial incentive to have a baby.

[It is possible to tap into a fellow citizen’s wealth through marriage, but Russia seems to have a California-style community property system in which assets acquired prior to the marriage are unreachable by a divorce plaintiff. Alimony profits may not be large due to the expectation that women in Russia are capable of working.]

Russian women are not shy about shedding a useless mate. “At least a third of the Uber drivers that I ride with ask me if I’m married,” said one local. “When I say that I’m not, they say ‘Good. Don’t get married.’ Then they tell me how they lost their job, were quickly divorced by their wives, and are now driving for Uber.” (If there are no children involved, a Russian divorce can be obtained through a quick and inexpensive administrative procedure. Even a judicial divorce in Russia is nothing like the festival of litigation that would be typical in many U.S. states. Ordinary citizens are able to retain lawyers to handle divorce cases without draining the family savings.)

As in other no-fault (“unilateral divorce”) countries, it is children who pay for the sexual freedom of their parents. An adult woman told me of her childhood visitations with the father that her mother had discarded. Presumably due to the shortage of men, he had been picked up by a different woman and had started a family with Wife #2. The daughter of the first marriage would go over to Dad’s apartment, complete with stepmom and new half-sibs, for a few hours every two weeks. They didn’t have enough room to keep her overnight and she never became a true member of her father’s family. This was not especially enjoyable for anyone.

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I have an idea for a news story that would be popular for my Facebook friends to share and talk about.

Headline: “Donald Trump proposes shutting down Federal wildlife refuges”

Picture: Bucolic lake with some mountains in the background.

Story:

President Trump today said that the nation had too many refugees and therefore he was shutting down Federal wildlife refuges.

Readers: What do you think? Would it work? Do you have a better idea?

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“D.C. and Maryland to sue President Trump, alleging breach of constitutional oath” (Washington Post) concerns a state and a quasi-state that apparently don’t like the Trumpenfuhrer or his family’s hotel.

My model of the U.S. President is that he or she doesn’t have that much power due to Congress controlling the purse strings. However, I’m wondering if a President could retaliate against a hate-filled state by moving federal employment out. Let’s take Maryland, for example. The Census Bureau has a massive office in Suitland, Maryland. This is apparently not the best neighborhood because one of my MIT alumni friends recently said “they put a big fence around the parking lot to cut down on carjackings.” He lives in Arlington, Virginia and would presumably be happier if the Census Bureau moved to Virginia, for example. The D.C. area is expensive and notorious for incompetent programmers. Why not move Census to a place where it is easier to hire good software developers, where the cost of living is lower so that the civil service salaries are more attractive, and perhaps where there is no state income tax so that employees will enjoy a boost in take-home pay?

Readers: Would it take an act of Congress for Trump to move a bunch of agencies? Or is this something that as the manager of the executive branch he can do as easily as negotiating a new lease on office space within the same state or city? Who has actually been to the Trump hotel in D.C.? What is it like?

Related:

• see Real World Divorce for how a move would affect the likely outcome of divorce, custody, and child support lawsuits for a federal employee (moving from Maryland to Nevada would be devastating to a typical plaintiff, for example, though statistically beneficial for the children)
• the book Code Warriors covers a proposed move by the National Security Agency out of Maryland and into Kentucky (Fort Knox, actually); at least in the mid-1950s this would have been done without Congressional approval (the military eventually decided against the move)

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I was part of the local coffee shop gathering the other morning. We were talking about fighter jet procurement and how the Swiss actually voted on the question of F-35 versus Saab Gripen versus sticking-with-the-old (story). I pointed out that “Angela Merkel says that Germany can’t rely on the U.S. in the age of the Trumpenfuhrer, so the Europeans will have to buy a lot more military hardware.” The response was “The Europeans are like teenagers. They want to rebel, but they also don’t want to be responsible for anything. The U.S. is the parent who remains in the background to clean up any messes.” Conclusion: Europeans are the new teenagers.

The conversation shifted to a friend’s Facebook post:

Another Happy Mother’s Day tribute to my mom, an original feminine trail blazer! Cheers to all the strong and courageous moms out there who forged their own path, … in 1970 became a private pilot. Happy Mother’s Day!#mothersday #strongwomen #womenpilot

He’s not completely wrong. A woman earning a Private certificate was a “trail-blazing” achievement… for Raymonde de Laroche in 1910. By the 1940s the Women Airforce Service Pilots were flying the P-51 Mustang, a 1,620-horsepower taildragger, and B-17 four-engine bomber. Their Soviet counterparts were flying 24,000+ combat missions. Jerrie Mock made it around the world in 1964 in a 1953 Cessna whose navigational gear today would barely suffice for a 50-mile sunny day hamburger run.

How is it that, in the aviation world, adult women are now being celebrated for stuff that used to be considered basic, e.g., taking a docile trainer around the pattern at an airport designed for transport jets? “That’s only been true for the past five years,” said one local Deplorable (he doesn’t have a rainbow flag on his house or Black Lives Matter sign on his lawn in our all-white/Asian nearly-all-hetero-couples town). “Before that, people were able to remember that women used to be as capable as men.”

We then discussed how this seems also to be true in the engineering and programming world. An adult woman who gets a straightforward program to work or who passes an undergraduate course gets extravagantly praised (see “Most computer science majors in the U.S. are men. Not so at Harvey Mudd” (LA Times), for example, celebrating women on track to get a bachelor’s in CS at age 22). A well-meaning, correct-thinking, Hillary-voting computer nerd friend in Boston described Jean Sammet, part of a six-programmer team on a committee designing COBOL, with “In the field of computer science she was a giant.” Twenty years ago, the same guy would have used “COBOL” as a synonym for computer-assisted mediocrity and incompetence. Certainly COBOL was promulgated years later than Fortran (which has given us hundreds of predictions of future Earth temperature?), ALGOL (which grew into today’s C, Java, et al.), and Lisp (which became a religion). COBOL was also years later than the business data processing languages from which it borrowed features, e.g., COMTRAN. A 1975 view from Dijkstra: “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” (Of course, there are women who are generally agreed to have been “giants” in computer science and you can see their names among the rest of the Turing Award winners (though don’t forget the “super-giants” Emil Post, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann))

The question was posed: What other group in society is regularly praised for achieving fairly straightforward stuff? “Children” was the immediate answer agreed upon. Thus the group concluded that, at least as far as their portrayal in the media and in descriptions by activists purporting to assist them, Women are the new children.

Readers: if the goal of 1960s “equality feminism” was to put women on equal footing with men, has the result of present-day feminism been to put women on equal footing with children? (And, separately, could this be why a lot of high-achieving women refuse to identify as “feminists”? Examples: Angela Merkel, the PhD in physical chemistry who runs Germany; Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, hasn’t been seen wearing a pussy hat; Patty Wagstaff talks about the men who helped her (including an ex-husband in Alaska), not about obstacles that were placed in her path due to her sex.) Do the well-meaning journalists celebrating minor achievements by women inadvertently make readers think that women are less capable than men?

[Personal anecdotal history: When I started programming in the 1970s, every software development organization seemed to have at least some women. I learned to program from a woman who had a terminal (110 baud, printing!) in her home. I can’t remember anyone suggesting that it was more or less difficult for woman to write software than it would have been for a man. At the software development company that I co-founded in the mid-1990s, two of the earliest employees were women, one a Caltech graduate and one an MIT graduate, and they quickly rose to management positions due to their superior abilities. No customer ever expressed surprise that the manager responsible for their project was a woman. Nobody within the company ever expressed surprise regarding a programmer or a manager being a woman. Base salaries were the same for men and women (this was before the transgender age, so those were our only two categories) and bonuses were decided upon by a committee of project leaders. Women were awarded equally large bonuses by their peers.

In classes that I have taught at MIT, ranging from probability theory to circuit design to database programming, women have usually been over-represented among the best students.

I’ve been part of the same airport community since 2001. There has always been a mixture of men and women at every level of flying experience and nobody has ever said “I am surprised to see that Woman X is flying a jet now” or “I don’t feel comfortable with Woman Y as my instructor.” One of my primary instructors was a woman. My first flight in the cockpit of an airliner during training at Comair (Delta regional jet subsidiary) happened to be with a female captain and young male first officer. When I came back from the flight, nobody in the training class expressed surprise that the captain had been female or asked a question regarding her competence.

Among the pilots that I have worked with as an instructor, the ones who identified as female didn’t stand out as having any difficulties learning, nor did any ever complain that she was struggling to overcome a sex-linked barrier.

So… if I didn’t have the New York Times and a cluster of social justice warrior friends on Facebook, I would be aware that women were a minority in flying and computer nerdism, but I would not be aware that women faced special obstacles in these worlds.]

Related:

• Sho Yano, celebrated for earning a bachelor’s in science at age 12 (Yano went on to earn his PhD at 18 and MD at 21, useful to remember next time someone brags about an academic achievement!)).

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A Manhattan friend has a 10-year-old who is interested in “coding” (the Dad’s phrase; I’m going to guess that the work of Claude Shannon is not actually what the child wants to learn about). The kid has already looked at code.org and done some programming in Scratch. What’s the next step?

New Yorkers; are there good hands-on programs for children this age?

Everyone else: even for adults, learning programming and/or software engineering seems like a sterile exercise. Without a customer or a project goal, how does anyone stay motivated to push through the tedium of modern programming environments? (SQL and Haskell possibly being exceptions, but what kind of database would be interesting to a child (SQL) and what would a kid want to do with Haskell?) Would it be crazy to try to match up a 10-year-old with a customer who wanted something done? Or should 10-year-olds program games for themselves and friends to play? Or should a smart 10-year-old just be helped by a parent or family friend through standard college-level programming classes?

[I started learning to program at age 12 (1975-6), but it seems doubtful that anyone today would want to use the same tools: Fortran IV on a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe; 110 baud printing terminal with acoustic coupler (literally 1 million times slower than a modern broadband connection). McCracken was my tutorial.]

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I try not to read more than a headline for any story involving a celebrity. Thus I’m aware that Bill Cosby is on trial right now, but I don’t know much more.

Questions for Readers:

• What’s been interesting and/or new in this trial so far?
• How much longer is it expected to last?
• What are the potential consequences? Other than the attorneys involved on both sides, is there anyone who can benefit financially from this proceeding? (e.g., if he were convicted criminally are there still civil lawsuits working their way through our legal system in which a criminal conviction would be helpful to a plaintiff? CBS says that there are currently 10 women trying to get cash out of him via civil litigation and that two of the plaintiffs are “attending the criminal trial”)

Related:

• Cosby: His Life and Times (my 2015 book review)
• What was supposed to happen between Bill Cosby and the women who are suing him?
• Divorce litigator on the Bill Cosby mess
• Camille Cosby deposition: America’s legal system at its finest

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A 60-year-old money expert friend was tapped to give a talk to his college classmates. He knew a lot about buying or selling $50 million in bonds at a time, but wasn’t that familiar with the challenges presented to the typical consumer financial planner. Here’s an outline that we developed that readers might find interesting…

Problems

1) longevity risk

2) inflation risk

3) higher costs starting at 75-80 likely (not insurable because this is a move to a $7000/month independent living place, not a nursing home)

4) insurance company default risk

Assumptions

a) $X in home equity; $Y in investments (maybe say $1MM and $2MM for concreteness)

b) Social Security entitlement

c) want to keep risk of living only on Social Security (having exhausted assets) to less than 2%

d) want to die basically broke, though maybe leave the $X in home equity to heirs

Questions

i) how much can one spend each year during Phase I of retirement and how much during Phase II (independent living) as a function of $X and $Y

ii) is it worth paying an insurance company to take on the longevity risk via an annuity? Or, given that the costs of the longevity risk don’t come until 30+ years from now, is it cheaper to handle this oneself? Are insurance companies giving away annuities cheap due to their overestimates of their investment returns?

iii) what would be the right structure of annuities if going the annuity route, to handle both inflation risk and the likely step-up in living costs?

iv) if not going the annuity route, what is the right structure of investments and withdrawals for living expenses?

Closing

Remember that we live in a world of screen addiction for most people who don’t have a full time job. So try to make sure you’ve got a project before you retire and/or that you’re going to be living in a place that keeps you stimulated and excited about learning and doing.

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A Gentleman in Moscow won all kinds of awards. The entire novel takes place within Moscow’s Metropol hotel, which I recently visited. The actual hotel is nothing like the one portrayed in the book, making the work questionable as a source of history. However, there are still some excerpts that interested me (below). The book concerns an aristocrat who is purportedly kept under moderately comfortable house arrest in this fancy hotel after the Russian Revolution.

For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

And when the Count’s parents succumbed to cholera within hours of each other in 1900, it was the Grand Duke who took the young Count aside and explained that he must be strong for his sister’s sake; that adversity presents itself in many forms; and that if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.

“It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life,” he began, “that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces. So I view it as an incredible stroke of good fortune at this stage in my life to have found such a fine new friend.”

Picking up his chopper, Emile pointed at the rest of the rack and cautioned the Count: “Tell your boys that my lamb is served rare. If someone wants it medium, they can go to a canteen.”

“The Bolsheviks are not Visigoths, Alexander. We are not the barbarian hordes descending upon Rome and destroying all that is fine out of ignorance and envy. It is the opposite. In 1916, Russia was a barbarian state. It was the most illiterate nation in Europe, with the majority of its population living in modified serfdom: tilling the fields with wooden plows, beating their wives by candlelight, collapsing on their benches drunk with vodka, and then waking at dawn to humble themselves before their icons. That is, living exactly as their forefathers had lived five hundred years before. Is it not possible that our reverence for all the statues and cathedrals and ancient institutions was precisely what was holding us back?” Osip paused, taking a moment to refill their glasses with wine. “But where do we stand now? How far have we come? By marrying American tempo with Soviet aims, we are on the verge of universal literacy. Russia’s long-suffering women, our second serfdom, have been elevated to the status of equals. We have built whole new cities and our industrial production outpaces that of most of Europe.” “But at what cost?” Osip slapped the table. “At the greatest cost! But do you think the achievements of the Americans—envied the world over—came without a cost? Just ask their African brothers. And do you think the engineers who designed their illustrious skyscrapers or built their highways hesitated for one moment to level the lovely little neighborhoods that stood in their way? I guarantee you, Alexander, they laid the dynamite and pushed the plungers themselves. As I’ve said to you before, we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it. But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.”

Some might wonder that the two men should consider themselves to be old friends having only known each other for four years; but the tenure of friendships has never been governed by the passage of time. These two would have felt like old friends had they met just hours before. To some degree, this was because they were kindred spirits—finding ample evidence of common ground and cause for laughter in the midst of effortless conversation; but it was also almost certainly a matter of upbringing. Raised in grand homes in cosmopolitan cities, educated in the liberal arts, graced with idle hours, and exposed to the finest things, though the Count and the American had been born ten years and four thousand miles apart, they had more in common with each other than they had with the majority of their own countrymen. This, of course, is why the grand hotels of the world’s capitals all look alike. The Plaza in New York, the Ritz in Paris, Claridge’s in London, the Metropol in Moscow—built within fifteen years of each other, they too were kindred spirits, the first hotels in their cities with central heating, with hot water and telephones in the rooms, with international newspapers in the lobbies, international cuisine in the restaurants, and American bars off the lobby. These hotels were built for the likes of Richard Vanderwhile and Alexander Rostov, so that when they traveled to a foreign city, they would find themselves very much at home and in the company of kin.

“Everyone dreams of living in America.” “That’s ridiculous.” “Ridiculous? Half of the inhabitants of Europe would move there tomorrow just for the conveniences.” “Conveniences! What conveniences?”

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

This posting is mostly a placeholder for me, but if you like the above, read A Gentleman in Moscow!

The book is somewhat topical given today’s panic over “inequality.” It portrays a world in which the lives of rich people are completely separate from those of the masses. Despite the vast cost difference between Hillary Clinton’s Gulfstream G450 and a middle class family’s Honda Accord, I’m not sure that the difference in day-to-day lifestyle is as vast as what is described in the novel between a European or Russian aristrocrat of the day and a peasant. Hillary and the rabble use the same air conditioners, refrigerators, smartphones, washing machines, etc. Maybe Hillary never has to personally touch any of these appliances, but pressing the “start” button isn’t all that onerous.

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A Facebook friend who is passionate about Hillary, Trump-hatred, and demanding that Everyone Pay Attention, linked to this interview with a Harvard Law School lecturer:

it could justify a further investigation into obstruction of justice on the part of the president. The matter certainly warrants an investigation.

It was at a meeting in which he asked everyone else to leave, which is an enormously suspicious thing.

The difference between this and President Nixon in Watergate is that in Watergate there was a tape. [Trump = Nixon without a tape recorder]

The action of [Comey] releasing this information was incredibly self-protective. [Why would he need to protect himself? He is at home collecting taxpayer-funded pension checks? Or he is working as a lobbyist or for a government contractor getting paid $1+ million? Or maybe he will write a book for $10 million?]

The article was published by Harvard itself. The Facebooker described it as the “clearest explanation.”

Here’s a piece by a Harvard Law School professor (not published by Harvard, certainly!):

President Trump also had the constitutional authority to order Comey to end the investigation of former national security adviser Mike Flynn. He could have pardoned Flynn, as Bush pardoned Weinberger, thus ending the Flynn investigation, as Bush ended the Iran-Contra investigation. What Trump could not do is what Nixon did: direct his aides to lie to the FBI, or commit other independent crimes. There is no evidence that Trump did that. [Why didn’t Trump do this, actually? Just pardon both Hillary Clinton and this Flynn guy and move on?]

Throughout United States history — from Presidents Adams to Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Kennedy to Obama — presidents have directed (not merely requested) the Justice Department to investigate, prosecute (or not prosecute) specific individuals or categories of individuals.

It is only recently that the tradition of an independent Justice Department and FBI has emerged. But traditions, even salutary ones, cannot form the basis of a criminal charge. It would be far better if our constitution provided for prosecutors who were not part of the executive branch, which is under the direction of the president.

The president can, as a matter of constitutional law, direct the attorney general, and his subordinate, the director of the FBI, tell them what to do, whom to prosecute and whom not to prosecute. Indeed, the president has the constitutional authority to stop the investigation of any person by simply pardoning that person.

In a world where people think that the legal system should be deterministic, at least to some extent (and you’d hope, on the definition of what conduct is criminal), how can we explain the discrepancy between these points of view?

It seems that the first opinions are those of a legal expert who was appointed by a Clinton family member (Bill) to a federal judgeship. The second opinions are those of a legal expert who was not similarly favored by Bill or Hillary.

[The other fun recent Facebook item was from a student at a liberal arts college. Citing a video of Senator Claire McCaskill talking about our government-directed health insurance schemes, she said “It is always women who fight against injustice and power.” There was a huge quantity of feedback on this observation, all of it positive, mostly from folks most of their way through $500,000 of U.S. K-12 and liberal arts education. I wonder how it would work for a student who cited Jesus, Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mandela, and MLK and concluded “It is always men who fight against injustice and power.”]

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The boring actuarial types of the car insurance industry publish data at http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates on “the number of driver deaths per million registered vehicle years.”

Set the form to “Very Large” and “SUV” and you’ll see that the 2WD Chevrolet Suburban has a death rate of 0-38 (confidence interval) whereas the 4WD version of the same car is at 11-67. (They also give you the actual number, but I think the confidence intervals are a fairer basis of comparison.)

The “large” SUV world also shows that the 2WD versions are safer.

For minivans they break out the Toyota Sienna 2WD (2-16) and the Toyota Sienna 4WD (1-37). [Note that the Honda Odyssey seems to be the safest minivan, with a confidence interval of 1-15, which is an upper limit lower than anything I found other than a couple of Lexus SUVs (0-12 and 0-14, which does raise the question of how meaningful the lower limit is; if it is 0 does that mean it is impossible to kill yourself, sort of like in Groundhog Day?)]

In the midsize SUV world I couldn’t find any pattern.

Readers: Want to look at this? How about the hypothesis that 4WD encourages people to venture out in bad weather? Is that supported by these data?

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